Dan LeFebvre  01:52

Before we learn more about your film career, everyone watching just heard your last name in the introduction. I’m sure you get this all the time. Your brother is Sean Patrick Flanery, who I will always remember as Conor McManus from the cult classic film The Boondock Saints. So let’s start by getting that question out of the way. What’s it like having a famous actor for a brother?

Robyn Flanery  02:12

Um, interesting, and we’re, I don’t think of him as famous because we’re barely two years apart, so we kind of grew up really tight and so on. People are like, Oh my god, your brother. I’m just like.

Dan LeFebvre  02:28

He’s just your brother.

Robyn Flanery  02:31

Yeah! But I live in New Orleans right now, and there’s a bar here called The Boondock Saint where they play his movie on loop. And yeah. So a lot of people do ask that question to me on the regular, and he’s, he’s just a regular dude who’s, you know, got kids, and is a really nice guy. I mean, he does do the Comic Con circuit for that movie still, so he’s really active in that, and I know that he’s written and produced and directed a few things, so it looks like he’s but he spends a lot of time with his kids, doing athletics. Mostly, that’s really what his life is

Dan LeFebvre  03:17

We’re going to talk mostly about your career, but I had to ask that up front.

Robyn Flanery  03:25

No worries at all.

Dan LeFebvre  03:27

Well, you you started to go down the acting road back with student bodies. Was a horror comedy in 1981 but what made you decide to work behind the camera instead of front of it?

Robyn Flanery  03:36

Well, the funny story about student bodies is this, I was in a very exclusive private school in high school, and a girlfriend of mine, it was for actors, models and athletes and things like that. And I wasn’t any of those. I was just a science person. But she said, Hey, can you drag me to an audition after school? And I said, Okay, what’s it for? And she’s like, I don’t know. And she showed me the sides, which I didn’t even know what sides were at that time. I mean, no acting experience at all. I She goes, come in with me. So I’m sitting in this row of chairs. There’s literally hundreds of people there, and this dude walks out of the room, and he walks up and down and he points at me. I go, I’m not here to audition. He goes, you are now. Do you know how to scream? And I’m like, No, dude, I I promise. I’m sure I didn’t say dude, because I was 17, but I was like, no, no, no, I don’t want to do this. And and my friend says you should go try. And then I went in, and they’re like, You got the part. And then that girlfriend, I think he still hates me this day, because that was kind of her dream, but it wasn’t mine, so I wanted to learn the science behind film always, but I’ve had offers to be in front of the camera a lot more than behind, but I don’t. I struggle on camera. I struggle with that. So I chose to do what I felt was more i. My speed, which is producing and directing. And first I started out making little commercials for people, and then I started making documentaries about things that I thought were really globally important. But that’s kind of how that started. And then Sean moved out to Hollywood after I did that movie, way after I did that movie, because he was in St Thomas at University of St Thomas when he left, and he’s that was the funniest story, because we both worked for our dad at that time. He’s just a semester short of finishing college, and oh, oh, I don’t want to talk about all that, but yeah, he went out there, and then he got, you know, he really wanted to be in front of the camera. I never knew that, because he was in school for pre law. Oh, okay, yeah, I Yeah. So it was a surprise, but he got a big break while he was working at DJI Fridays. Isn’t

Dan LeFebvre  05:54

that kind of the classic story, going to Hollywood work as a weird and then become an actor. That’s

Robyn Flanery  05:58

what happened. And then. So he always had work, you know, sort of rolling since then, and but I also got into it. But I started doing location scouting first, and then, before I got my hands on any really big equipment, and doing that, I was able to move from that. And because that doesn’t pay a lot of money, and it’s not like I’m following the money, but you always sort of want to move up, but at least I do, if I’m going to work at all, if I’m going to work at all, I’m going to work, you know, up a ladder, I hope. But the next way up was to do housing for a list actors. So I got to meet a lot of A listers, and that helped me a lot in getting into documentaries and stuff like that, but also finding them houses when they came to New Orleans to film. So I’ve some of them. I have NDAs that I can’t discuss. Some of them I can. And, you know, very, very interesting field,

Dan LeFebvre  06:59

I’ll say here on the podcast, normally, when I talk about the true story behind historical movies, I’m referring to the based on a true story part the actual history. But I’m super excited to get to change that up with you here, Robin, because now we’ll get to hear some true stories from historical movies that you’ve worked on, like Dallas Buyers Club with Matthew McConaughey and the butler with Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. What are one or two of your favorite stories from your time working on those movies? Yeah,

Robyn Flanery  07:26

I did a a list actor scouting for houses on multitudes of films. Dallas Buyers Club. I ended up showing a lot of houses to to Matt McConaughey, and he chose a different one from another person. So I wasn’t every day on I wasn’t an everyday person on that, but a lot of my friends worked like solidly on that set for so many weeks. It was a really fun set to work on, and a lot of people really enjoyed it. But that’s one that we all have NDAs that we can’t even discuss where we showed anything. I can tell you Matt McConaughey talked about Halo with my daughter for 30 minutes, and I was like, hurry up. But other than that, I can’t say much about it. Still, I

Dan LeFebvre  08:18

just, I’m just picturing him looking at the house and going, all right, all right, all right, all right. And that’s the 180 pictures. Oh,

Robyn Flanery  08:23

cool. He’s paraded through that. He’s not like that, just a regular person he was. We really nerded out with my daughter about video games for a long time, and she was about to go off to college to become a computer engineer to program video games. So they had a lot in com. They got a lot more talking time than I did, but, um, he’s really, really nice person. So is his wife. They’re really stellar people. I don’t have anything negative to say about them. And he’s really easy to work with, like, super easy. And seems to be, I don’t know if he’s a method actor, but he very well could be from some because it’s been on two occasions whenever, for two different movies when I’ve seen different sides of him. So I think he may be method, but I could be way wrong. I don’t know, but he’s a really nice person. As far as the butler, that was an interesting experience, because I did housing for some of the executive producers and things like that, and learned a lot about the way people want to live as the opposed as opposed to reality. So we did a lot of we did have a lot of 2am calls from people in houses and things like that for simple things, but, but I had to be back and forth on set to pick up checks a lot for that. And everybody was lovely and staying with Django Unchained, same thing that was very interesting, the most interesting feature I’ve ever had any affiliation with ever, just because of the way that they did it and the way that the stars worked. And I also might, since my daughter was doing a she. She was about to go off to college. She was in her senior year, and I got her an internship on that film and art department. And during the filming of that movie, Michael Riva, who was the art director, died, and Paige Buckner took over as the art director, and that’s who my daughter was directly working for, and she also side gig as a nanny for their baby. So just and I house them. So it was, it was, it was real tight. And I remember opening the refrigerator in our department, there’s notes on everything, because everybody, evidently, they had somebody that went around, not

Dan LeFebvre  10:40

to name names, but somebody, yeah.

Robyn Flanery  10:43

It was really fun. Doing all of that is really an interesting psychological study in people, and learning how to deal with people, places and things, and not making any of them mad at the same time. It’s an interesting and almost impossible job, but I tried to give it my best. As you say, the

Dan LeFebvre  11:04

first thing that comes to mind is, you can’t make everybody happy. But it sounds like that’s what you try to do. Yeah, try to

Robyn Flanery  11:11

do that. It’s, it’s, um, it they all have personal assistance so, but when they’re on in the middle of tonight, they don’t, so you’re dealing directly with the stars and the producers, and they don’t know how to do certain things. And, you know, sometimes you have to kick in and help and or just, you know, read a manual. And back then, you know, it wasn’t as easy to Google every single thing or YouTube every single thing and just send them a video, and they wouldn’t have put up with that anyway. You have to really go there and go, no, here’s how you open this. Here’s how this works, and don’t shut this this way, or that will happen. And this, you know, in New Orleans, there’s a lot of mixed craft architecture that is very interesting and old. There’s a lot of history. So it’s not new construction and smart houses everywhere. There, we do have that. But back then, wasn’t so much fat. So there was a lot of I’m sure people would come in and go, it’s beautiful mansion. I don’t have work anything well.

Dan LeFebvre  12:06

And it’s a house like this, not the normal house like it’s, and so it’s, I could see that too, where it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s new you think of when you get new car, you got to learn where all the different little pieces and all the things are, yeah,

Robyn Flanery  12:15

you’re right. It is a lot like that and and just the interesting personalities and things that people you think everybody knows how to do a certain thing? Nah, no, no, no. Some people have never done things like making beds or coffee, and that’s okay. I don’t do that for a living, but I learned that so I could teach somebody. It’s not that hard, but for the most part, that was just a real pleasant, pleasant experience. The only unpleasant experience I’ve ever had doing any kind of location or cast and crew work is on a reality show that will forever go nameless, call them Voldemort. It was a year of my life that I would never want to put on my resume again. I don’t ever want a job like I get, and never want to deal with

Dan LeFebvre  13:09

that. I guess you got to have the lows sometimes, to appreciate the the better jobs. Yeah,

Robyn Flanery  13:14

yeah, it does. It made me that’s a good point, because that’s exactly what it did. It made me go, oh, I don’t like that, for sure, and I know and because the only thing that really benefit for that are the viewers, writings and the producers, all the other rest of people really don’t. And it’s made me sad as a human to sort of see people exploited that way. I couldn’t deal with it. I have a I have one of these empathetic hearts that makes now I do movies that are only to do good or to call to action, and that’s pretty much it, but I had to find my niche by learning all those things. Just like said, Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  13:47

well, I know we all understand that. You know, movies are for entertainment, so they’re not going to be entirely accurate, but the flip side of that, we expect documentaries to be factual. And as a filmmaker who’s worked on both historical movies for entertainment, we just talked about some as well as documentaries. Do you take a different approach for these two kinds of movies? And you’re when you take work on them?

Robyn Flanery  14:07

Yeah, there’s two totally different forms of development for both. There’s, you know, there’s research and development for both types. But one of them is strictly creative, and the other is factual. And now sometimes on the feature films you do, if you’re using a living character or public figure, you have to make sure that you’re legally accurate. But on a documentary, I know there are some people that do make documentaries now based on their feelings and what they think a situation is, rather than doing the research that’s unfortunate that that’s happened. I’m trying my best to revive the the method that we learned before of always telling the truth and having sources and facts. That’s why I said I was I started with a scientific background, because I if it’s not on pub men, there’s no paper about it, I’m not sure that’s a real cure. I. I want to know. And I worked in the library one because I finished all of my electives way too soon, and I was in all AP classes. So I worked in the library and I read. People would ask me where the fiction section was, and I would tell them it was the eight hundreds, which is biography. So that’s the kind of All right, go learn something. I’m not a fan of big academia, but I am a fan of the truth, so I try to seek it out and tell it as much as I can. But I think that’s an important part of being a really good filmmaker, and also asking everybody that works with you what their perspective is, so you know where they’re coming from.

Dan LeFebvre  15:36

That’s an interesting point, too. Yeah, that I’ve heard Justine doing this show. You know, you when you talk to historians and stuff, they they’ll point out that, you know, one person’s perspective of the truth is is different than somebody else’s. An example that I always like to give is the battle of Dunkirk. You know, this huge historical battle. But one person’s perspective of that, depending on where they are in that battle, is, can be very different. They can both be valid and so telling those stories from the perspective matters. What perspective you’re telling the story from

Robyn Flanery  16:07

too. Oh, that is. That’s so that is so profound and so perfect, because that’s something that I think a lot of filmmakers could really learn from. If you only tell it from one perspective, your lack, you’re really ripping yourself off. Tell the whole gamut and let the the watcher, the viewer, decide what they think is best from their own value system. Usually the truth will come out, but if you tell it from only one side, that is, for instance, that you see, I guess there are four documentaries on the men in Dez brothers, and also Diddy and also Anna delvey, and there’s a million perspectives. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could see them all in one Yeah, that’s the way I like to make stuff. People got really angry with me when I made broken worlds the island, because a lot of people on the island that sold property thought that I was going to negate them from making sales. Yeah, maybe so, but the truth is going to get told, and I’m going to tell it, and you can’t stop me. Just try. That’s what I always tell people. I’m like, just like Sean. People are like, he’s a black belt. You know, he might be a little dude. Sean and I are about the same exact height and and we’re both tall and skinny, but we’re formidable in different ways. He’s a black belt, and I think I’m kind of that same way, but with my mind, because I will not let something go until I get to the bottom of it. And people know that about me, they’ll they’ll sidetrack. They’ll be like, I don’t need your help. You might want to know something, but then again, I’m just about to do a documentary on a family Hollywood royalty level, like, let’s say it’s not John Wayne, but of that ilk, their whole family and all of their generations now want to tell all their trauma. So we’ll see. Will I want to see what their perspective is from a victim and from an attacker and from just as a human being, what they think of these stories as When, when, when they write their out rings, somebody’s going to tell them that read them their outline back so they can hear it from a different perspective, so they can go, oh, wow, how does that land? You don’t want to just start talking on a live stream and and spew a bunch of stuff with no background. So I tend to have my subjects talk about it from their perspective. And then I get all of them together, and then I can sort of go, oh, a ball just formed in the air. Let’s it’s the earth. And now we have a project, but we have it from all perspectives at that point, and then we can tell it from to make some reasonable assumptions and truths, possibly, well,

Dan LeFebvre  18:59

you mentioned briefly broken worlds. And I want to ask about the broken worlds the island and Rita’s Island. Both of the documentaries tell stories of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the category five hurricane that hit Puerto Rico in September of 2017 How did you get involved in those projects?

Robyn Flanery  19:13

Well, I lived there for I had a my vacation house was on that island, and I just sold it in April of 2022 and I lived there for a long time without knowing that, because even in the disclosure of real estate, the realtor did not let us know that this was the island that had been bombed by the Navy for over 60 years, and the ground Water might be environmentally challenged. So I took it upon myself after finding that out from meeting a person who was an Army UXO tech who worked on the range, told me the whole story, and said, yeah, they keep trying to cover it up for everybody buying new stuff here. And I went, huh? Then I noticed. Al Jazeera went and did a an expose on that exact realtor by saying, I’d like to talk to you about your luxury properties on this now, I don’t go do stuff like that. I’m going to tell them I don’t know what I’m going to do with this footage. I want to interview you. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have just turned it on someone like that. But people do need to know, but they need to know that there’s also a lot of good being done about it. You know, at the same time, there’s a cleanup being done. It’s a major Superfund site. It turns out that it you do have to disclose that it’s a super fun site on a real estate disclosure. So that’s a good thing that people know now when they move there, there’s also not a hospital there, and you could step on depleted uranium, and they’re still still radioactive. You know, you can guide your counter around there and find a lot of stuff. So when I find out things like that, I want to get the whole story. So I did in the course of that, I met are Rita Maldonado, who has a book out called the zen of dancing in the rain, whichever, it’s an Amazon bestseller, and I highly recommend everybody read it. She is, was an Army veteran who was shot in Afghanistan and all, and was on a reality show after that, did a lot of promotion for herself, but went through a serious, serious evolution in her life of losing capacity to walk, and had to reteach herself and everything. And she’s won a Purple Heart, which is now in the Smithsonian, you know. So there’s lots of cool things that she’s doing from that, and that spun off from that. So I wanted to make a special documentary about her that covered why she was even in it, because she wasn’t a native or a Taino Indian, Native of the island of bieke Vieques, but vieque is the way the islanders say it, and they pronounce it that way, and they’re Taino Indians, indigenous people, and they have specific religions and all that. So I wanted to do a part two to that, to let them know about the culture and what they really respect, because it’s an island off of it’s seven miles off the southeast coast of the island of Puerto Rico, so it’s like its own little country. Very, very interesting. There’s usually never more than 10,000 people on that island, even in the highest of seasons, and there’s not a hospital. So it’s, yeah, people who have healthcare issues. It’s, it’s a serious issue. That’s why I just finished making alongside Carrie Mitchum, who’s Robert Mitchum granddaughter, she and I produced and made a show called profit over people. That’s the content is all out on YouTube, but we’re going to sell the content to a streamer, to do a documentary like the 10 Melendez brothers, or whatever you know, that they want to put out there. I don’t know, but that’s not the documentary about their family. That’s a separate project in itself. But profit over people is based on the United States healthcare system and how broken it is with and it’s got stories from people of from all walks of life to verify this, and it’s almost medieval how cruel some of the things are that we found out during the the making of that it took us two years to make it

Dan LeFebvre  23:12

so just to make sure I’m understanding, the island vis is where they dropped bombs for like, 60 years, And there’s also not a hospital on the island for this radioactive I mean, that just seems crazy.

Robyn Flanery  23:28

Oh my god, let’s do a TV show, a reality TV show, on this island, and make it about cheap places to live in the Caribbean and sell a bunch of property. And that that happened. I bought one, and then I went down there and I found all that stuff out. Now, you would think, that’s really stupid, Robin. Why didn’t you do the research on I was, I was that blue water, it can pin it’s, I mean,

Dan LeFebvre  23:57

just seeing the footage in the documentary too. I mean, there are some beautiful visuals. I mean, it’s a beautiful location, unbelievable.

Robyn Flanery  24:03

And I didn’t use, and neither did any editor use any colorization on that. It’s natural. That’s the way it really is. So you walk out every day and you’re like, oh my god, this is so beautiful. This, oh my god. And then you just it affects your mind, and you get Island time, and then you find things out. And you then finally, your mind back after the spell is all from the beauty, and you want to find out what’s in the dirt. And that’s what led me to that, and some other people were talking about it on the island. And then we made the movie after the hurricane, really, I went back to the I went down to the island that visit after, directly after the hurricane, just to make tourism promos for my friends who own businesses that they I thought they had lost. Just as a help, I was going to donate my time just to make promos. But I got there and a lady that I met who worked on the range sat me down and told me the story. She goes, and then the town doctor comes to me and says, Robin, you’re here that you got a whole crew here. You’re not making promos. This is what we’re doing. And I’m like, tell me, what the hell is going on? She started telling me and about all of the cases of the diseases. And so then we started talking to historians and scientists and everybody, and it got bigger than we thought. And after many years of reformatting and making it, we sent it to film festival, 101, of awards, way more than I thought. And then we did spin off Rita’s Island, and then people just kept hiring us to do different things. I

Dan LeFebvre  25:35

mean, it sounds like people were just itching to tell their story. And yeah, I mean,

Robyn Flanery  25:40

but then they wanted to hate me after I told

Dan LeFebvre  25:44

well, yeah, I guess, I guess that’s how it goes. Yeah.

Robyn Flanery  25:46

I mean, my agent at the time said, Robin, haters are fans. I’m like, I don’t like this, this. I’m not I like this. And he’s like, just calm down. It’ll die down. And it did, but boy, it was rough the two years that it was on Amazon, ever United States people to see I’m I’ve never received that level of hatred for anything I’ve ever done from the most entitled people on Earth. Disgusting is

Dan LeFebvre  26:18

this broken worlds, arenas, Island are kind of both together.

Robyn Flanery  26:21

Worlds, broken world. Island redesign was just a love fest. Okay? I was gonna say

Dan LeFebvre  26:25

because, I mean, her story, since it follows more just her instead of it is kind of her perspective, but her story to me as I was, I mean, it just, it’s, it’s like the topic of a movie. I mean, she’s in the army, she on a reality TV show, and then she ate a slug or something. And then, like, I got a 50% chance of not waking up. And then she goes, like, from running 50 miles before the TV show, being paralyzed, having to relearn how to walk. And then finally, sets down there on the island in March of 2017 and then hurricane Maria hits, destroys the home. Her husband passes away while she’s five months like it just it seems like a movie plot line.

Robyn Flanery  27:06

I know it is, and I’m sure that, I’m sure the right producer will end up making that. If it’s not me, I don’t know if it’ll be me. And Arita are pretty, you know, type, we still talk, you know, on the internet a lot, and I love her children so much. The first time I interviewed her, Alex was there, her husband was there, and she was pregnant, so, you know, I met, was able to meet him. And this is a really small community, so everybody’s really knows everybody. It is the story for a movie, and she’s written a book, like I said, Zen, the zen of dancing in the rain. And it’s a beautiful story. Everybody should really read it. And she’s working on another book now. She also is so healthy that she’s able to teach dance every day. I mean, well, I think she’s gotten down to twice a week or three times a week now, but yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  27:56

wow, wow. Yeah, I can’t wait to hopefully that becomes a movie to shine more light on her story too. I

Robyn Flanery  28:03

hope so it should. It’s a beautiful story. The locations are absolutely fabulous. But I do think that now that I have this type of experience, it should be a body who makes it, a Boricua, a person of that that culture, a filmmaker who lived there on that land, that’s who deserves to make it. I wouldn’t mind being a contributing producer or being the director if they wanted to hire me, but I do think that that story should be told by them. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  28:32

if we shift back to movies for entertainment purposes, a lot of people see, you know, the list of names, and there’s just this whole screen, you know, black, and then just huge list of of white text of all the different people. And it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around how many decisions are made across the entire production that can impact in particular for my listeners, you know, the historical accuracy of movies. I like to use Titanic as an example, because, you know, the tip of the iceberg above the water, but most of it’s underneath. Nobody really sees. So over the course of your career, what sort of things have you seen that have impacted the historical accuracy of a movie? For those of us that are just watching it, might not even think about gosh,

Robyn Flanery  29:15

I would think the thing that comes to mind also is Titanic and the amount of scientific experimentation and historical facts that James Cameron went out and got, I mean, there’s so much of that that changed what people thought about the way that movie was made. And I went into like, making broken worlds the same way I wanted to find people who were for it and who were against it and why, what their reasons were. And in the final cut, I think one of the biggest monologs was cut out and and I would like to put that in our and so I think the the way you make decisions can really, really change the inflection and tone of a film in such drastic ways that you it, and the way you cut. At it. The editor has amazing control. Oh, if you allow them to, and a director and an editor and producer, an EP should work like it should be a triad to get if you if you’re all in the same headspace, that’s perfect. If you’re not, it’s kind of a disaster. So yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  30:18

think we’ve seen those movies too, yeah,

Robyn Flanery  30:22

but I do think a lot of things, like there were so many different perspectives of Docu movies, on documentaries, on a 911 for instance, that had drastically different perspectives. J6 same thing. So I think it comes from the mind of the storyteller anymore, whereas it should go back to the history and accuracy of a panel. And I think that the panels that we all use as test data for different movies, different scenes and movies even it can go down to like, does this scene work? You know? Well, let’s get a panel and see what they think. You get 12 different or 25 different opinions, and that can help you change things. That’s when pickups come in and you gotta spend that extra budget that you better plan for. So it’s a an integral part of it. But if you also have an auteur, it doesn’t play a part in anything, because they’re going to tell the story the way they want to, and it’s all written up beforehand in pre and you just show up, and that’s what you do.

Dan LeFebvre  31:27

Not as much of that design by committee. It sounds like with the focus groups and things,

Robyn Flanery  31:32

if you’re if you’re an episodic director for a series that’s all done for you, you don’t really have a lot of choices like that. It’s more just, I don’t like that finally

Dan LeFebvre  31:41

work. Yeah, creative

Robyn Flanery  31:45

to me, I would like, think of it as, like, let’s say, if you’re a cardiologist or an ER doc, an ER doc, you’re like, doing a shift, right? You see all kinds of stuff. But if you’re a cardiologist, you’re just seeing a bunch of parts, and you get to know those patients. So it’s like, you know your waiter is on his shift, your ER doctor is on his shift, but the manager of the restaurant cares what you think, and the doctor who’s going to look at your heart is going to need to know you and all of the aspects of your life. I think that has a lot to do with movie making. How much you want to tear it apart depends on, unfortunately, these days, it depends on how much money you

Dan LeFebvre  32:19

have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. I guess Money Talks, as they say sometimes,

Robyn Flanery  32:24

in my little field, that now I have a little niche little I consider it a niche field of empathetic, call to action, journalism, documentary. And in that field you do have a lot more people that go, Wait a minute. I wonder what these people’s we’re sitting here doing this right now. We don’t know what they think. We don’t know what they think. Why don’t we ask them? It’s as simple as that, because you when you’re doing a really good documentary, sometimes you’re out shooting a scene and you’re like, there’s all these people around wonder what they think we’re doing. Let’s ask them. That’s who I am. I’m just so inquisitive I think I’ll die asking a question, and are probably the wrong kind of question. I’ve been told by so many scientists because I’ve made a scientific documentary recently, and scientists would tell me, You cannot ask me about my intellectual property. You’re ruining me. Oh, my God. I’m like, What in the hell are you talking about? You have taught me this whole class. So clearly this information is out there. I’m just asking you to elaborate on the subject matter at hand. Some people do not want to do that, so it just depends on subject material, I think, and who the person is. Everything is so different. We call it the film Apocalypse right now because we don’t know what’s happening. Everything’s changing to streamers, independent journalism is happening. It’s just not the hierarchy that was so a lot of people think of it as we’re doomed, and then the other half of the people think, wow, I finally get my shot playing films level so you see what you were talking about. They’re two totally different perspectives.

Dan LeFebvre  33:59

Well, that leads right into my next question, because earlier I mentioned you’re acting in 1981 and you’re still in the business, so I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of Hollywood history over the course of your career. What are some of the key ways that you’ve seen the feature film industry change over the course of your career? I hate

Robyn Flanery  34:15

that they sold out to loud audio mix in.

Dan LeFebvre  34:19

Gotta make the theater rumble.

Robyn Flanery  34:23

I don’t like that. And I don’t like that. They make prequel sequels, everything to nonsensical, ad nauseam. I don’t like that, and that’s for money. But then again, I think we’re turning a little corner, which I just mentioned about. Uh, everybody’s has a level, level playing field. A lot of people can produce their own films and try to sell them, or put the content out on a public streamer that they use, and somehow come along, what they’re doing right now is a lot of people can glean from this little tidbit, which I’ll throw out there, which I. Probably shouldn’t. People always tell me, you give out ideas so freely structure map. But this is the truth. If you put out your content, it’s decent content. There’s Netflix scrapers. There’s those your internet scrapers that go and scrape for content, and whatever’s getting the highest numbers, they’ll call to buy. So why not make your own stuff and put it out there? That’s what I was talking about. Profit over people, all the contents out there, whenever we mix it correctly and I list it to people that I might know at Netflix or wherever go. You might want to take a look or scrape my site. They might have already done it and said, I don’t like it. F that. That’s fine, too. But you know, people love and hate you as you go through life, and if you don’t get used to that, you’re not doing well as a human. Gotta get used to all of the stuff. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  35:44

yeah. It makes sense. Well, you talking about the way things have changed. What’s some advice that you would give for the next generation of aspiring filmmakers? Go for

Robyn Flanery  35:55

it and do not listen to people who tell you, Oh, it cannot be done that way. Bs, because people told me that a lot, and they’re like, Oh, pretty little girl. Let me tell you how to do stuff. Don’t listen to that ever in your life, sweetheart, go out and do it you can. And whether it flops or whether it makes you a billionaire, do it from your heart and you’ll never be a failure.

Dan LeFebvre  36:21

Makes sense. I mean, and I love the telling the story, but not being afraid to go out there and ask those questions, because, you know, there will be people that push back on even the questions that you’re asking too.

Robyn Flanery  36:33

Yeah, some people don’t like to answer questions, and some people do you, but most people want to talk about themselves. So to an aspiring documentarian, I would say, and this might sound manipulative, but go read the 48 Laws of Power. Robert Green has some things in there. It’s not all satirical. Just do it. Utilize at rule number one all the time. Never outshine the master. Just don’t you might be 10 times smarter than the Master. Don’t say it, don’t act like it, and don’t pontificate on anything. Just take the notes internally and use them for what you need later. That’s Val that’s a very valuable lesson that I think a lot of kids should learn right now. Don’t outshine the master until it’s your turn to do that, and then take what you learn from them and use it. And I’ve always done that. There’s a lot of people who will love to talk about themselves, and this is a little bit of manipulation, like I said. But if you want to ask questions to somebody who doesn’t like to answer questions, start talking to them about themselves, then they open up. And it’s a it’s a really good way to make friendships too out of people that you ordinarily would have been an adversary with, you know, I don’t have, I don’t think I have very many enemies anymore, but who knows next project I might have a billion. I feel

Dan LeFebvre  37:50

like that’s something that has been lost. Just just talking to people and just, you know, getting on, figuring out where that that page is, that you can have a common thing, like you said, a lot of people like to talk about themselves, so just do start there, yeah, yeah,

Robyn Flanery  38:05

they do. And they like to talk about successful projects that they’ve done. And any like, I like to tell I like to ask filmmaker, like, one of my mentors, that I took a really small mentorship class with Jeff arch. He wrote Sleepless in Seattle. He told me, he gave me the best advice. He’s like, take out your anger in writing. And boy, that works. It really helps. When you’re angry, you can become use that creative energy to write out a scene and you it’s amazing how it can cure you from you don’t punch a hole in the wall, you don’t do anything crazy. You just write it down, and it affects what you’re working on right now, you know, and finish what you start. Don’t have 25 projects ever open everywhere, because, believe me, none of them will work. I’m saying this from experience. No, it doesn’t work. Three. Do three at a time. That’s okay, like one, one in thought process, one in development, and maybe one shooting, you know, at the same time. But don’t have 25 projects open, and you’re going to be email crazy. Your brain can’t handle it. You’re just a human. We all think we are more than that. And yes, we have chat GPT, and yes, we can do or work a lot faster, but it’s not the same thing as like, if you, if you do things, if your brain fires too fast, it’s it won’t rewire as fast. And I’m working with a neuropharmacologist right now on a medical device video that is, she’ll be speaking at all of the conventions coming up. She’s amazed and doing a TED talk. But um, the science that I’m learning from, from just that and the perspective of the way MRIs can read brains and map people and think they there’s so many, you know, ways you can look at that. I’m just saying. Be open to anything but, but just like I told you before, learn what you don’t like and then don’t do it anymore. Don’t make yourself do that. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t grow you. Sometimes

Dan LeFebvre  40:11

you don’t know until you go through it, though. So that’s, that’s a definitely good piece of advice.

Robyn Flanery  40:16

Yeah, some people love working on reality shows. Boo day to them. You know, there’s more for them.

Dan LeFebvre  40:24

Yeah. Well, movies always do a great job of helping the audience kind of travel to another time and place, and we see, especially with the historical movies that we talk about on this show, where the wrong location can really take you out of the story if it’s not in line with what really happened. It’s just another crucial element to storytelling that I think a lot of people don’t really even realize how much work goes into it. So with your experience as a location scout, how do you help ensure that the actual location that we see in the movie aligns with the story that’s being told? Before

Robyn Flanery  40:56

you go scout, you talk to all of the players, sometimes they don’t want to let you do that. I would say you read the entire script and all of the director’s notes and any editor’s notes that are already there, because there might be color grading notes, there might be VFX notes, there might be all these things that can change the appearance of places. If you do all that, you’re pretty prepared. I would say, if you want to be a location scout, go out and do some spec for some big guys. They’ll take it. That’s means free go out. They’ll they love Wait, let’s free work. Yeah, I’m sick. I’ll be 62 this year, so I’m not doing spec work anymore. But when I was younger, I did a lot of spec work. That’s how I got into this. And then journalists came to me, and they’re like, How’d you do this? How’d you get the snitch? And I’m like, Well, I just started doing it, and then I started doing it for free, like the for instance, the first time the NASA me shoot facility was used for movie making is really kind of because of me, because I was hired for spec to do by Ken Gord, a producer who was good to make a movie called silver cord, and he needed to do 35 he needed to have a space to do 35 foot higher wire hanging stunts, right? So I’m thinking, and my friend husband, was an engineer at NASA. I said those silos are empty right now, because we’re not doing space shuttle anymore. Can I come out and look at them? You know, a crazy thing like that. So I got there, and I met with the guy who took me on a golf cart all through the whole secret facilities, and everything was really cool. And I ended up that that movie never ended up getting the green light. But with my big mouth, I tell everybody, oh, my God, this is a perfect place to make movies, and tons of them, Green Lantern. Oh, Green Lantern was a lake for airport, but, Geostorm, there’s so many on my resume that did stunts there, but I didn’t get any pay for any of that, because that was spec work I did. And I could be angry, but no, I’m like, real. I’m cool with that, that they figured out a place to make our our little area, some money, I

Dan LeFebvre  42:56

think too. It kind of goes back to what you’re talking about. Dan, don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if somebody doesn’t want to answer. But, I mean, the answer might be no, but you want, okay,

Robyn Flanery  43:07

just don’t be afraid to ask, because the worst that somebody can do to you say no. And you can just ask as many people as you want, and you can get a whole lot of knowledge that way, perspectives too. And then it might help you in script writing, if you need to make changes. Well, so and so and so I heard on the street said this about this place and so and so said that, what do you think we should do? Y’all and you might get a whole team, your of your data people to tell you, Oh, wow, that makes sense. Maybe we should change that. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  43:34

we talked a little bit about some of the differences between like Dallas Buyers Club and documentaries, but you’ve also worked on some fictional movies, like Planet of the Apes. Do you approach your work any differently knowing that a film is, quote, unquote, based on a true story?

Robyn Flanery  43:47

No, because during those I didn’t really care what the story was about, because I was dealing with the A list actors and housing them on those so I didn’t care much about that. But if I work directly on the show, then, yeah, I wanted it to be historically active, but I was the low person on the film at that point in time to writing. How many say by the time it got to me, everything was packaged. Makes

Dan LeFebvre  44:15

sense. I know throughout your career, you’ve helped some other directors bring their vision to life, and you’ve also been in the director’s chair yourself. Do you find it’s easier to tell a story on screen as the director, or is it easier to follow someone else’s vision?

Robyn Flanery  44:29

It’s easier to tell my own story, and also harder, and it’s also harder, and then easier to tell someone else’s and you have to ask a ton of questions if you’re doing someone else’s vision. Because no matter how they say, Oh, my heart’s not in this. Yes, it is. And if they tell you, Oh, you do whatever you want, they don’t mean that. They don’t, especially when it comes to VFX or any kind of thing like that, they it’s like an explosion escape means you. 10 different things to 10 different people. So if you that’s ringing the script building, to me, that means somebody walking away from throwing a match explosion behind him. I’m victory. But to someone else, it means someone exploding out, you know, and that’s a whole different thing. So either way, whatever you’re trying to portray, you need to develop a deep and intensive relationship with your director or your writer, your executive producer, who has, whoever has gone out and gotten the money for that movie you listen to, and they’re the boss. Yeah, pretty much the buck stops there. Literally, I like that. Yeah, and on my movies, in in K in catering, I don’t adhere to this rule at all that the director always eats last. I’m always the hungriest, so I just eat whenever I want. But on a lot of feature movies, you there must be special accommodations for the director in the catering areas and so, and they make sure that there’s the way that they make sure their crew got fed, is make sure there’s still enough for them when they get there. And so that’s a thing I learned that that, you know, a lot of people do. And I was like, Well, you know, I ordered enough, so I know I didn’t just trust somebody doing a line item on my finance sheet and maybe cut this and not that. That’s where, if you have a little bit of control, then you don’t have to have those types of rules. That’s what makes it easier. Whenever you’re telling your own story and you’re making your own budget, it’s so much easier because it flows easier. But then again, if you get something wrong, it’s all on you. Now that’s true. So some It depends if I if I want to do someone else’s vision, like I just got asked to work on something that was about human trafficking. And for me, the story was too dark and there was too much content. It was at critical mass. And so I passed. I think it’ll be a wonderful movie, but I don’t know how many people it will help at this point. So to me, in with my vision, what I do unless it could be a real call to action, it didn’t seem it just seemed salacious to me, so I didn’t want to do it. But someone else will see that project as not salacious and find a way to help people, because it’ll fit in with them, and that story would be better told by somebody is, I think, getting to the point in your career where you can realize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and being okay, and being able to throw your ego on the floor and go, you know, I don’t think I’m the best person to do this, but here’s this person might be. That’s when you’re really good, when you can do that and and I’m not saying I’m really good at all. I’m bad at a lot of stuff, but I’m good at knowing what I’m good at and what I’m bad at. Like

Dan LeFebvre  47:47

you mentioned earlier, talking about reality TV. I mean, that’s not for you, but it might be for somebody else, and that’s fine. You’re like, they might be good at

Robyn Flanery  47:53

it too, yeah. And I’ve referred my friends to the name. Some of them love it. I’m like, yay. They go for you

Dan LeFebvre  47:58

exactly. Wait, you talked briefly about visual effects. And I have to ask about your VFX background, because before I started this podcast, I worked in CG software, like real flow was kind of my specialty, with my soft image xsi, for those old so I love to hear more about your visual effects background. Can you share a little bit about

Robyn Flanery  48:18

that? Yeah, I mean, a little bit about it, is, is, is, is pretty much as far as I ever went in the old school way of doing it, you know. So I can’t really talk from a place where you can talk from, from Maya and, you know, writing your own code for this, although I’ve done that for specific animations, but that’s in the 90s, you know. Yeah, little different sense, totally different since then. So right now, I will hire it out if I have the budget for it, but if I don’t, if it’s for, like, a little short commercial. I mean, look, I’m not above using a plug and play, drag and drop type of thing anymore, but I also have worked on some you know, where you use the platters, like where the Mandalorian was made, so you can have a lot more freebies in writing than programming and engineering those scenes. But most people nowadays just want fast, fast, fast. And I, I think there’s an art to it that’s lost right now, but I think it’s on the way back. So we shall see. I’ve done a whole lot of like, you know, DIY, Foley and stuff like that, which goes along with the FX in many ways. But people don’t want to spend money on that anymore. They don’t even want a wine item. If they just, oh, we’ll use this app later. Yeah, that doesn’t work.

Dan LeFebvre  49:42

Foley art is one of those. It’s just pure magic to me. I don’t I’m not a sound person, but just just the way they’re able to come up with, oh, this sound is this? I, my mind doesn’t work that way. Yeah. For me,

Robyn Flanery  49:55

if you take like, a machete and you have like, a very, very hard, I. Burg lettuce, and you whack it, it sounds like decapitation. So

Dan LeFebvre  50:05

I would, I’ll take your word for it,

Robyn Flanery  50:13

just nerdy, weird stuff. You’re like, well, I bet that sounds like this. You have to start the you have to listen for about, I guess, a good month or so, or you can take a class in it now, but listening to things, and if you listen more and talk less, it’s amazing how many patterns you can find in sound. So perhaps that helps. But I’ve helped a lot of people find studio space that do Foley, you know? And it’s really interesting to learn. And I watched some stuff audio, you know, and have some dps, like, my daughter is engaged to a DP, who’s amazing. And I’ve learned some techniques, you know, that I would never have known, because I have a car that I have, a Bronco that has a convertible top. So and I bought it so I could shoot, like crane shots from the top and Astro photography and stuff. So I think, if you I really like the old school ways that we when we used to be able to program things and make them unique, than the way we use the little drag and drop or overlays and things like that these days, but it’s so much more expensive to do that now. So people are taking it like, Oh, my, I can handle looking, but I can tell I’ve done a lot of betas for a lot of AI VFX and stuff like that. So I can, I can really, really tell when it’s not real and I don’t like that, and I know it’s not real when you’re writing the program, either, but it seems a lot more real. Look Okay, for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the cloud progression. Come on. Genius. Can you do that now? You can do some smoke effect, but it’s not the same. No, not to me. I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know, and maybe that, since I don’t specialize in that anymore, there’s a lot of stuff that’s better, but I haven’t seen it,

Dan LeFebvre  52:12

yeah, well, I think a lot of it kind of sounds like it goes back to what you were talking about before. Like, if you have 20 projects going on, you’re not going to be able to stop. And you’re talking about, like with foliar, to be able to identify the different sounds. And it almost sounds like another way of saying, stop and smell the roses. Like take the time, especially when it comes to something creative, it helps to take that time, and the best way to do that is to not have a million different projects going on at once, but rather just focus on what you can do. Know what you’re good at, like you were talking about earlier

Robyn Flanery  52:41

you’re so right, and it’s always that way. I think the older you get, the more you realize that and and maybe I’m just privileged to have been able to have that type of time, and other people don’t, and I recognize that, but it always helps everything if you put your whole heart into a project, and if you do put your whole heart into a project, then you’re real dedicated to listening and learning and experiencing so that other people can experience what’s going on in your head. It’s really hard to get what’s out in here, out onto paper or out onto the screen in a way that is relevant, relatable to other people if you don’t, and especially if you don’t do that.

Dan LeFebvre  53:26

Well, let’s say they made a movie about your life. What would the title and synopsis of it be?

Robyn Flanery  53:31

Oh, God, she died in the saddle. I don’t know. I mean, I have no idea. I’ve done so many things and so many projects that it would sort of be like, I think she maybe the title would be, she wanted to do everything.

Dan LeFebvre  53:49

Good title, yeah, I do,

Robyn Flanery  53:51

and it would be about all the different things I’ve learned how to do. Because I think the more I know how to build a house, I know how to fly a plane. I know how to fly a drone. I know how to operate multiple cameras. I know a little bit about good lighting and audio, VFX, every, every aspect of everything. So you just if somebody walks in and they’re a green director that didn’t, never went to film school or anything, perhaps they don’t know what the departments are, you know, and what they’re for. I think if you sit and learn all that, like you said, there’s a million white names under that. This keeps scrolling forever. If you start learning what all that is, you’re better help to the team. So maybe just do that. And that would be what I would suggest doing, learn, use. I think we’re put here as human beings to learn. So I could be well wrong. Maybe if you are here to be hedonistic, you know, person and run around naked and do wild things. But to me, it’s been about to learn about those people. I want to know about those people, why they chose that. You know, when I was four, I wanted to join Greenpeace, and, you know, so. I think this just, I was just boring like this to be people called me, God, you do so much Superwoman Rennes. I’m like, No, I’m really not. I’m a regular person. I’ve just have an inquisitive mind. That’s it. I’m not anything special,

Dan LeFebvre  55:15

going back to not being afraid to ask questions, and also what you’re talking about too, like not to outshine the Masters, but but to learn from them and soak it in. Go to those different departments, talk to those different people, find out what they do, and learn from them

Robyn Flanery  55:28

and always credit them. Always it’s I mean, unless they don’t want you to like if they don’t like their name associated with yours. You know, some people don’t for different reasons, and so you don’t do that, but if you do, they’ll come and tell you, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  55:46

usually not shy about that. Yeah,

Robyn Flanery  55:48

no, they’re not shy if you do anything like that. But for the most part, if you, if you’re just trying to learn from the master and like, like Robert Greene said, Well, I edited this piece of, you know, journalism and I did a better job than my teacher. I should have never done that well. But that also pulls up my heart two different ways, because if you’re learning from your master, aren’t you supposed to go out and do a better job than them? Or they’re the teacher. They’re not doing the practice anymore. Aren’t you supposed to go out and practice that? So I do have a little there’s always a difference. That’s why I’m saying. There’s a million sides to everything. If you can spend your time on your project, figuring out what everybody and everybody’s opinion is on it, then you can tell the story. That’s part of being a historian, though, and it’s part of why your your podcast is so good, because that’s what people need to know. Especially Gen Z and Gen alpha, they don’t know everything’s so fast and about hype and and followers and popularity, that’s fame takes you here, where things are hollow. David Bowie, I mean, think about what you really want, and if what you want is for people to like you, people don’t really like you or even know you, if they’re just responding to you on social media from a character you play. For instance, my brother. Everybody thinks my brother’s like Connor. No, he isn’t. He doesn’t even have a tattoo, for God’s sake. Y’all, it’s he’s an actor who does a job well in real life. He’s a very thoughtful, intuitive. He loves music. He’d be great DJ if he wasn’t an actor. I think he’s given me some soundtrack of my life. And you know, it came from our parents. And our dad loved music, and Sean does too. But I think that taking the time to learn how things used to be done, how you think things will be done in the future, and all the choices you have now, and choosing the best every time makes you a better filmmaker or a better person at anything. Never be afraid to ask questions to people. I mean, if you’re intimidated, remember you’re alive right now and I’m live right now. We’re both wearing meat suits that we didn’t have choice to pick, and we’re in the same timeline, so we all have about the same lifespans, basically. So why would you be afraid of asking another being like yourself? You’re at a different point in this journey. So they’re on the same journey. They’re not better than you. Ask them, all I can do is tell you, no kid, I’m not going to answer that, or F you, or whatever they’re going to say, don’t be Be not afraid. My children. Get out there. Ask questions. This is your earth. Pound it down and learn about it. Watch all the movies, man, watch all the old movies, and then watch all the remakes and see what you like better. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  58:48

see how they’re different. We’re talking about with Rita. And just you talk about movies in general, there’s just a great way to tell stories to be remembered. We just heard kind of what your movie was going to be. But of course, the whole concept of my show is to compare movies with the true story, and so there’s gonna be some differences there. Let’s throw out the constraints of a movie. How do you want to be remembered as

Robyn Flanery  59:10

a person who really cared about and gave their whole heart to things? I would literally give the shirt off my back, even if it was my last shirt, to someone who I thought needed it worse than me. People know that about me also. People think I am very, very mean and harsh. If you get that side of me, you deserve it, and I know that, and I’m okay with that, but I would like to be remembered as a person who considered all viewpoints and who was kind. That’s it, not rich, not famous, not smarter than anybody, but a person who really was inquisitive boy, she really needed to ask a lot of questions. That’s probably the way it would happen, is like, damn, she asked too many questions, but

Dan LeFebvre  59:56

you won’t know until you ask. And so I think it’s great to ask those questions. Questions, and because other people, too won’t think about that some sometimes too, I can’t remember you just, you just mentioned it a moment ago, where somebody else had a different approach on on something, I think was one of the DPS, or something had a different approach, you wouldn’t even thought of that same sort of thing with questions you wouldn’t even you might ask questions that somebody else won’t even think about, and then that sparks another question that they have that you wouldn’t think about, and everybody learns and is better because of it. Yeah, and that’s

Robyn Flanery  1:00:26

the biggest thing that I wish people would get back to you in filmmaking, is teamwork. Okay, like, really, really, really, using the I don’t know if hivemind is PC anymore, running or whatever, but everybody getting on the same thought track, and so you’re all sort of rolling things off each other to where you make that perfect. And you can all see the little glowing sphere whenever the minds come together in the writing room. You know, you’re like, we got it and it wasn’t what you originally thought. If you walked in and just started being authoritarian, telling everybody what to do, you would have never gotten there. So why not just ask and give everybody respect. I don’t care whether they are your intern or whether they are the executive producer or God, they are all going to get respect and be treated equally as human beings that are in the same timeline, in the meat seat they didn’t choose trying to just live, you know, so respect is really key. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:23

yeah. Well, as we start to wrap this up, let’s end it on a happy note. What’s one of your happiest memories from your years working in the film industry? Oh

Robyn Flanery  1:01:31

my goodness. I think getting that shot over Mount parada boy. I mean, that was the perfect lens flare. I’m

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:41

gonna go back and watch that. Watch for that one again too. Yeah, now that I know that there’s no extra effect, you just assume there’s gonna be effects or things like that. And it’s like, too perfect to be real, but

Robyn Flanery  1:01:50

it’s all real. I mean, you know, I wanted to do the low water high rise, and did we? It didn’t even take us. I was blown away whenever I saw that in the dailies. I’m like, No, I was crying. It was fat. I mean, it takes a lot to get me to tears. Well, not really anymore, but you know, it That was beautiful. Finding something that just is physically perfect in the world, the film, the celluloid, whatever you want to call it these days, all melds together. And there’s just such beauty that it can’t be deny that.

Dan LeFebvre  1:02:23

Thank you so much for coming on the show to help my audience learn a little more about your part of Hollywood history. Thank you. And speaking of my audience, if you’re watching this right now, go to the show notes, because there’s a link to Robin’s latest project. So before I let you go, Robin, can you share an overview of profit over people?

Robyn Flanery  1:02:39

Yeah, profit over people is about the failure of the United States healthcare system and how people have suffered and died due to this. And so a lot of individual stories where people just want to talk about it. And I thought that it was me, because I have a disease that is a horrible stage four disease. I have had stem cells now, and they’re a very wonderful benefactor, and I’m much better because I went from being a terminally ill patient to a chronically ill patient. So I don’t want any more go find me money. Thank you, though, for offering that was really cool, but I don’t want to take anything that I don’t need anymore, because that’s not who I am.

Dan LeFebvre  1:03:20

I mean, I’m happy to hear that much better, too. That’s great.

Robyn Flanery  1:03:24

It is. But profit over people is at profit over people on YouTube, and it is a story. It are there multiple stories. We go all the way from a diagnosed narcissist talking about how they react. So that’s a really interesting episode, all the way to bioengineering and cell human cells and how they can be manipulated through CRISPR and DNA to different diseases and how they’re treated in different countries, as opposed to the United States of America. So it’s really interesting. Explains why medical tourism is $180 billion business, and we don’t get any healing. Why not? Yeah, we’re one of the very we’re one of the few developed countries that don’t have socialized medicine, and our our our congressmen and senators do, but we don’t get it. That’s not fair

Dan LeFebvre  1:04:18

for thee and not for me, is that, as it goes,

Robyn Flanery  1:04:21

right and so that that whole, this whole show, hopefully will shame them into fixing this. That’s our hope. We want to get an audience with Congress. We’re attempting to do that.

Dan LeFebvre  1:04:33

Oh, that would be fantastic.

Robyn Flanery  1:04:37

Yeah, I’d like to go speak to Congress to talk about why somebody like me has to go to lose a house in the Caribbean to pay for their illness and then get do a GoFundMe, you know, and continue to have to work really, really hard just to scrap to get to make a living, because I got sick when it could have been okay, but a doctor said you need to turn the camera on yourself. Rob. It. Well, I didn’t like that, but I did it, and then I went, Wait a minute, how can I get out of turning the camera on myself? I’ll tell other people’s stories. So that’s how it originated, and that’s what it’s about. And it’s, it’s tales of really strong things, and also it has some wins too. So runs the gamut. It’s fantastic.

Dan LeFebvre  1:05:17

I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, so much for your time, Robin. Nice talking with you.

Robyn Flanery  1:05:23

Thanks for having me.

Dan LeFebvre  02:21

Before we look at some of the details in the movie, if you were to give Maria an overall letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

Sophia Lambton  02:31

I would give it a G. So it’s going off the scale of customary grades here.

Dan LeFebvre  02:38

Doesn’t even count as a traditional letter grade. The opening scene of the movie is Maria’s death, but it’s also how it ends. And then most of the movie itself is the final week of her life, and we get flashbacks of Maria’s earlier life here and there that will throughout the movie that we’ll talk about. But let’s start today by filling in some of the historical context, because since the movie is focusing on that final week of her life, we don’t really get a lot of who Maria Callas was. So for listeners who aren’t familiar with who Maria Callas was, can you feel in some more historical context that we don’t see up until the timeline of the movie starts,

Sophia Lambton  03:18

Maria Callas was a Greek American soprano. She was born to Greek parents in Manhattan on the second of December 1923 she had pretty negligent parents. They were quite first of all, they just didn’t love their daughters, especially the mother, Evangelia. But the father George was also not great. He He had trouble sustaining contact with his daughters through the years, and at one point, when callous and he actually did an interview together, he couldn’t remember he got the dates of both daughters birthdays wrong in public. In an interview, he was a pharmacist, they were not well off. When callous was 13 years old, Evangelia decided to take her and her sister, yanti, who was known in America as Jackie, and generally as Jackie to Athens, Marie Kals, began performing very, very early. She was actually, according to her cousin Mary annexy, she was actually singing whilst playing with a ball, even at the age of three, and by the age of five, she was parading around the living room with a with her other cousins, shawl singing the habanero, or just fitted Dan Yeah, from the opera mignon, which isn’t even that popular in opera. She actually began entering radio contests at the age of think it was 12 and, well, I’ll, I’ll share more on that later. But she had quite a difficult time during the war in Athens, not just the war that we know of, but also the Greek civil war between communists and allies of the British, which was actually bloodier in Athens than World War Two. She came back to New York in 19. 45 trying to make a career, and reunited with her father, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years. But that didn’t help her much, so she went to Rona in June 1947 and little by little, she both made a career, but she also met her husband, Giovanni Battista minigini, a man 28 years her senior, who was not at all attractive, but she was not really she didn’t have a big interest in men or romance, per se, so she did love him. He was a father figure to her, and she she saw him as a nurturing man. He also became her manager, but in his over greed, he actually inadvertently calls for a bad reputation, because he demanded too much from opera houses. Demanded too much pay from opera houses, you know, spread rumors about other soprano she would never have spread herself anyway. They began to have marital problems because he kept insisting she’s seeing more and more at a time when she was really having very severe vocal problems. And finally, I’ll get to this more detail later on. But finally, he admitted he had invested their money in forgeries as paintings. And she said, Well, I’d like to take over my own career. And he said, No, that’s not going to happen. And he left her. He left her coincidentally, truly, coincidentally, as a time when she was when they were both socializing with the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis. And later on, later on, she began a relationship with Onassis that lasted for actually, it didn’t last much longer than eight and a half years. But throughout that time, having got I forgot to mention so she was building her career. Obviously, that what made her absolutely unparalleled was the fact that she could sculpt her voice. She could sculpt the tamper of her voice to really incarnate a character to the point that you sometimes don’t even recognize the voice. So you’re hearing a Japanese, 15 year old Japanese Geisha in the voice of a 3031, year old, a Greek American soprano who, by that point, was living in Italy, she took insane artistic risks that other singers generally do not take, because it’s it’s perilous for the voice, and her vocal decline is not exactly a mystery, but there were multiple factors going into it, various health problems, and that was the main plight of her life. Later on, actually, she she dumped Aristotle and asked us three months before he, quite famously, married Jacqueline Kennedy. During those three months after she dumped him, he kept trying to get her back, but she wouldn’t take his calls. He sent her bouquets. She you know, she just, she was actually traveling around the United States and Mexico, and was not answering his calls, but she did not know he was going to marry Jack Mackenzie, and was obviously hurt when he did later on. She knowing that she had this terrible vocal decline. I will have a mention that she never retired, and we’ll get to that point further on in the podcast, she never retired, so her career was never suspended or ended. But there were periods when she sang less because she was going through various health problems and that was impacting her voice. And she tried a film career. So she tried. She played the role of Medea in Pierpaolo pozzolini, Medea in 19 it was shot in 1969 came out in 1970 in the US. She tried being an opera director in Turin, where she and her tenor partner, Giuseppe DiStefano, who actually later, or actually around that time, in 1972 was already her lover, they tried staging Verdi’s events, but that didn’t fit her either. And she also tried giving master classes at the Julia School of New York series, master classes from October 71 to February 1972 which are all recorded and all on YouTube, and they’re tremendous fun. And this was later on, much later on. This inspired a play by Terence McNally called master class, which was on Broadway. It got Zoe Caldwell Tony, I believe it’s actually a very fictitious play, but the master classes themselves were fascinating. However, she found she didn’t really like teaching that much. She did have a big comeback tour with Giuseppe Miss Efrain from 73 to 74 when her voice was ready in a very, very bad way, and she considered many projects later on before Well, her health just kept getting worse, but also her voice just was not recoverable for various reasons. However, she was considering projects and practicing, rehearsing for projects up to her death. This film is apparently focusing on the last week of her life, but it’s very misleading even about that, because there have been various portrayals and perceptions of Mary camps being this terrible recluse at the end of her life. And yes, it is true that she did not go out as often she had. She was very, very unhappy, apart from the fact that Onassis, by that point, had died, because people tend to center her sadness on this, but also her dear friend, the film director, lucchinov. Ganti, who had staged her in opera, had also passed away not long after Onassis her dear friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had directed her only film, ROM role, had been brutally murdered at I don’t remember what age he was about. Her rating was about 5152 she had gone through various losses. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t recover her voice. So it’s not just that, oh on US has died and then she didn’t eat the house. That’s absolutely not true. In the last week of her life, she met up with Princess Grace. So Grace Kelly, who had who then became Princess Grace, she had lunch with her and the conductor Franco manino, a longtime friend of hers, reminisced about the past. She was also going to meet with the French choreographer Maurice Baja to discuss a potential project, some kind of film about singing with him. She actually was on the phone with a woman I interviewed, Bettina Brentano, who was still only a kid then, I think, 18 years old, so just about an adult. And she told Bettina, they Betina told her. They told me often, because Bettina was going to undergo an appendectomy. But by the afternoon, Mary calles had died, and she was also planning, according to George Moore, the president of the Metropolitan Opera Association, she was planning to visit him in Sotogrande, Spain. So it is not the case that she alienated herself from everybody and shunned everybody and said, No, I’m not going to talk to anybody. The head’s true, but the ending of her life was very sad. It was obviously quite premature, because she died at 53 but she was still very determined to Pierce, persevere and to survive.

Dan LeFebvre  11:33

Wow, yeah, it seems sounds like she had so much more to her than obviously we see in the movie, because we don’t really see much of her actual life in in the movie, it just kind of focuses on the end there, but the talking about the strain that it had on her voice, and just just the performances and opera that taking chances like that, but then getting into acting and teaching and all these other things too, was that something that was uncommon at the time, that she was doing things and then just almost mentioning her husband pushing her to do that was, was she being pushed to do more and more things that were strenuous and putting even more strain on her?

Sophia Lambton  12:13

Well, that’s a really good question. Dan, actually, because her career became very young, she sang, she was, I told I mentioned everything radio conscious. I think 11 was the first one. She was 11 when she entered the first one. She made her she sang her first role at the age of 15. Later on, she would say, my mother pushed me. But we also know that she herself was a performance geek from a very young age. She was very determined to succeed. She would say, reflecting back on her teenage years that she would work, she would work toward performing because she went, she actually attended two conservatories, the National Conservatory in Athens and the Athens Conservatoire, but she didn’t graduate from either one because she didn’t attend the mandatory harmony classes, as she thought the teacher was bad and she failed to examine music history. But she was a geek when it came to performance, and she would work from 10am to 8pm every single day. And she would reflect, reflect on it, saying, but you know, you would ask, well, didn’t I want to go out? Well, no, I had no interest in going out. I that was what she was. She wanted to she would say, the poet speaks of the mind’s eye. There is the mind’s ear. There is so much you can do even without a piano. And she would talk about rehearsing operas in her head, just on the bus in Athens during the war. So she she pushed herself harder than anybody else. Now, in terms of her vocal strain, that’s the whole giant topic, whether she pushed herself so hard that she handed is a difficult question. Is also the subject of her weight loss, which could have had an effect, but primarily what caused vocal decline was damage to the stomach muscles, which ruined her support, the support of her vocal apparatus, because her vocal cords were always fine. And she went to various kind of doctors, laryngologists, lung doctors, you know, she went to see all the specialists. And it wasn’t her ailment, in terms of her vocal decline. That wasn’t anything, uh, visible. It wasn’t something you could identify and say, Oh, so this happened, but she did get uh, several hernias, including one which she said was in the diaphragm, which would have also, uh, apparently it pushes out through the diaphragm, and she said it, she herself said it damaged her stomach muscles in terms of, was she being pushed to do things her husband when they were together, she was at the peak of her career, really the peak of her career. We’re talking 5758 59 Yeah, he wanted her to do things she didn’t want to do. He also tried to get her to sing when she felt unwell, so when she had the flu or bronchitis, and she did push herself through that, but she was also pushing herself through that because the media was giving her an unfair reputation as a diva, which was partly because her husband was demanding higher salaries, kind of to her, not to her knowledge. So she kind of left him in charge of all that, and didn’t want to. Have much to do with also because she had various arguments with Opera House managers, because she wanted everything to be perfect, not for herself, but for the composers. She always used to say, I am a servant of the composers. She was very self Lovick. She never thought she was giving enough, but she herself wrote an article for a French newspaper called out with just the arts, basically in 1958 saying, I will not, I cannot stand by and see opera being treated in a shabby or second rate way. So it was never about making life easier for her. It was about making life, making the world of opera as best as it could be when her husband did, and we’ll get on to this later on, when her husband did want her to do projects that she didn’t want to do, like film, for instance, he wanted her to be in. She was offered the role, the leading lady role in Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone. I think Carl Forman was produced with that which eventually starred Gregory Peck and Irene papas. She was offered the leading role in the German film called the Prima Donna. She was offered some kind of gig singing in a cabaret at Las Vegas, and that’s when she told her husband, no, this isn’t me. I sing opera. I don’t want to do some stuff. And she and she didn’t, in terms of the master classes and directing evasive Giuliani in Turin and starring in Medea, those were more. Those were her trying to find herself in other ventures, and she tried, she really committed to them, but she never felt quite at ease in any one of the three. But that’s a later callus that doesn’t have anything to do with her husband, because those ventures started in 1969 she split from her husband in 1959

Dan LeFebvre  16:38

if we go back to the movie, kind of throughout the movie we see a character named mandrax. He’s played by Cody Schmidt McKee, and he’s interviewing her throughout the movie. But it doesn’t really take long, as was watching the movie, to figure out that he’s not a real person. Mandrax is the name of a drug that she’s taking quite a lot. There’s a one scene in the movie where we see Maria’s Butler, frucci, oh, keeping tabs on how many she’s taking, and it seems like she’s taking at least four pills a day, along with some other medications. The movie doesn’t really talk about why she’s taking it and some of these other medications, so I thought maybe she was perhaps ill. You kind of talked a little bit about some of the vocal decline in that. But then there’s towards the end of the movie, not to get ahead of our timeline here, but begrudgingly, she gets some blood work done, and a doctor flat out tells her that she tries to sing the extra stress and medications that she’ll need to get through that will kill her. So can you unravel this whole mandrax thing that we see in the movie and how it played into if there was an illness that Maria had?

Sophia Lambton  17:36

Oh gosh. Well, first of all, she did not have any kind of substance abuse disorder at all. She was not addicted to pills. She did take a pills called mandrax to sleep. She had terrible insomnia problems. And on two occasions in her life, it is true that on two occasions in her life, she accidentally took too many so and it was hard to wake her up. So that was on the 17th of February, 74 when she was supposed to sing at Carnegie Hall, and four years, almost four years before that, on the 25th of May, 1970 but those were accidents caused by the fact that Maria Callas was, to be honest, quite an ignorant person when it came to anything except mutual sorry, music, music and culture at large. She her entire schooling. Her entire schooling, except for music, finished at the when she was 13 years old. Wow, she did not graduate high school. She went from her mother taking her from New York, from middle school to enlisting at a Conservatoire, being asked by her mother to lie and say she was 17, you know. And she also did not have close relationships with her parents. Her sister, that was a tricky relationship. So nobody. There was no guidance to say other than the fact that in those days, you know people, her generation typically do not know much about pharma, pharmacological things in general, you know tablets or anything else. But there was also no guidance to tell her about this. So there were two occasions when she took too many but she did not have a disorder. She was not addicted. She was not dependent on these tablets. It is true that in the last couple of years of her life, she really, really had problems sleeping, and she did ask her sister Jackie to send them from Greece because they were not on the market. But I don’t understand why that’s such a big deal when they were, for instance, they were, they were not on the market in Paris where she lived. That’s true, but they were on the US market until 1983 so we’re not talking about some forbidden, you know, forbidden, taboo drug. Here she was, however, yeah, so I will mention, also in the film, it’s, it’s completely fictional, because the doctor mentions her liver. And Marie Kellis did have many health problems. I never heard about anything wrong with her liver from her or anybody else. Ironically, I actually remember there’s at one point she says, Onassis liver is okay, but there was never anything about her liver. She had so many problems throughout her life. She was such an unwell woman for. First of all, and most of all, she had, or you could say, lethally, low blood pressure, because eventually she died of a heart attack, but was mostly spurred on by her blood pressure. But she pushed herself and pushed herself, and at one point in May 1965 performed Norma, which is one of the most difficult operas for any soprano, when her blood pressure was 70 over 50, so she would just push herself and push herself. She had had an underactive thyroid in her youth. She had eczema, she had acne, she she had such low blood pressure she could drink 10 espressos a day. She had allergies to antibiotics, which meant that when she in 1958 when she had she had an, I won’t say what it was, because it was an embarrassing for her. It would have been an embarrassing gastro, gastroin, gastrointestinal, yes, gastrointestinal thing that caused it made her have an operation. She couldn’t have painkillers after them because she was allergic to the painkillers. But she performed il Perata, which is one of Opera’s most difficult operas ever. The next day, when she got on a plane, her legs would be swollen in this film, at some point, Angelina Jolie’s character Maria, says her legs went purple. Don’t know where that came from. Her legs never went purple, but her legs would be swollen because her circulation wasn’t that great, which is what happens to people with low blood pressure. She would suffer from terrible migraines. She had allergies to various herbs, including garlic. She would have anemia in about 1970 I think she had cerebral anemia, which is a particular kind of anemia. She would be diagnosed with exhaustion at various points in her life. She had jaundice at various points in her life, and also at various points in her life, she got laryngitis, bronchitis, pharyngitis, trachetitis, which all disturbed her performances, because obviously they have an effect on your voice when she did finally die. This happened shortly after she had complained to her doctor that she felt pain on the left side of her back, which was obviously a precursor to a heart attack, but he he attributed it to flu and rheumatism. It is, however, also true that she had been diagnosed with dermatomyositis, which is an autoimmune disorder by a doctor called Mario Joker. So Marco jocovid. So I remember his name is Joko. That’s it. Marco Mario. Okay, sorry, I don’t remember for this moment that was an autoimmune disorder. And he then later speculated much, much later in about 2002 so decades after her death, he said maybe that caused a vocal decline, but the median prognosis for somebody with that disease is about 12 years, 12.3 years, for someone receiving treatment and her vocal decline. You can speculate when it began, but it was already very present. By 1957 she died in 1977 so I don’t think she had dermatomyositis, untreated and survived for 20 years, but that caused a violet tinge on her neck and wars on her hands. So she did have very many ailments, obviously. I mean, I say obviously, obviously. I’m not a doctor. She also didn’t have a post mortem, but she had a heart attack. She collapsed in front of you. Mentioned her button of filcho. She collapsed in front of him and her maid, Bruna, who was also fictionalized in this film, they were there when she died. She clapped. She had a heart attack. She died in terms of, was her singing killing her? I wouldn’t go that far for sure. And she was never told by any doctor, if you sing, you will die. She was, however, advised against singing because of her exhaustion at various points, and she often did it anywhere because she feared terribly. She feared being villainized by the media and being described as a diva who refuse to go on stage. Because, instead of saying no, I mean, I know the media have to exaggerate and have to have clickbait headlines. And Callis, by the way, understood that too, she would say, I know, you know, they have to fill their pages, and they have their job, and I have mine. But instead of saying, recalci goes on stage despite having blood pressure of 70, over 50 or, you know, despite being very ill, they, they would say every time she had to cancel or suspend a performance, Marie Council does again. She’s a diva. She’s unruly, uh, they were not interested in reporting on her health at all. Um, so, yeah, that’s, that’s a story that’s just a little bit of her medical history, correct

Dan LeFebvre  24:21

me if I’m wrong. But with that, and then what you’re talking about earlier, with with her husband kind of being almost like a manager for handling all the business side, but then also with her not having a lot of schooling and focusing more on just the creative would it be correct to say that she she trusted, say her husband or or others, for a lot of that diagnosis, and she was that really just focused on pushing herself creatively, and then whatever the consequences were, she not being a doctor herself, just kind of trusted whoever was giving her advice at the time, whether it be her husband or doctors or. Wherever that may be,

Sophia Lambton  25:00

I would say that’s pretty much correct. But, yeah, she was a workaholic, and she really ran herself ragged. But even in July 1957 when she was diagnosed with exhaustion, and the doctor said, you really should cancel the next performances of La sonambola, she didn’t. She didn’t. She had previously asked for four instead of five. And there was then a scandal, because the manager, I can’t remember, who was organizing it, didn’t understand that she was going to sing the fifth one. So instead of the media saying there was a mix up between her husband, her manager, and it was, it was a La Scala production, but it was performing in Edinburgh and saying that there was a mix up between my guinea husband and it wasn’t getting Getty. Someone else was organizing it anyway. Do you remember the the guy? The name of the guy organizing this round was an ambulance. The media said, Oh, there she is off again, canceling performance because she’s such a big celebrity, and she thinks she has, she thinks she’s entitled to, and of all of all adjectives, Maria Carlos was not at all entitled. On the contrary, she was. She could be quite self loathing, and she endlessly tore herself to pieces feeling she hadn’t given enough.

Dan LeFebvre  26:12

Yeah, yeah. But that passion that she, I mean, you don’t get to that level without loving what you’re doing. And she obviously loved it. And you’re saying, you know, the hours that she practiced even, even as a child to get there, I mean, and then being a workaholic, you’re just gonna run yourself to that, to your own detriment, even, I think we see that happen a lot with with a lot of people, yeah,

Sophia Lambton  26:34

yeah. I mean, rehearsals until 3am and then to continue, you know, a record that was only 40 minutes long. Took her 40 hours to record and add another for another record. She spent 12 hours on, no, sorry, she spent three hours recording 12 bars of an aria because she didn’t like the way it was coming out. Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  26:57

wow. Well, I have a feeling I might know the answer to this next one. But in the movie, mandrax is not the only hallucination that we see her having. We see orchestras and choruses in various places that she’s going, but then not you mentioned her sister. And near the end of the movie, she gets to her sister comes to visit, and she grasps onto her sister arm to see if she’s even really there. Do we know if Maria saw hallucinations, like we see happening in the movie?

Sophia Lambton  27:27

No, Maria did not see hallucinations, except for when she was four years old, shortly after she got knocked over by a car. She kind of dramatized this when I don’t know how well she remembered it, but she remembered it as I was in hospital for three weeks because I got knocked over by a car, and I saw in my head hallucinations about music, which were fascinating and stimulating. But I don’t know how much of that was true. That was adult Maria, remembering four year old Maria, but other other than when she was four years old, she never reported hallucinations. She did have insomnia, and she did wake up quite late by the last two years of her life or so, so typically waking up midday or one o’clock. But no, she did not suffer from hallucino. Because, what I mean, why would she have suffered from because she would, that’s the thing. It’s bizarre. Mandrax was prescribed primarily as at least for her, it was a sleeping pill, right? And she didn’t have a substance abuse disorder, but she took them to sleep. I don’t know how this movie continues. Can insinuate she was taking them four times a day when she wasn’t asleep for the full day. You know, she takes

Dan LeFebvre  28:29

it right before she goes out. You wouldn’t take a sleeping pill right before you’re going out.

Sophia Lambton  28:35

Oh, by the way, I also forgot to mention that she had glaucoma. She had to take eye drops every at one point is every half hour. Maybe later on, it was every hour, but yeah, she was also going blind for some reason. This, this movie which wants to be so dramatic and serious, doesn’t touch on that, but it makes up hallucinations when she actually was losing the ability to see. Having already been severely myopic her whole life, she was very short sighted when she was on stage, she couldn’t really see anything. But she preferred it that way, because that way she felt she was on her own world. So she wouldn’t put in contact lenses. At one point, she accidentally left them in. So she would wear contact lenses in the daytime, and at one point she actually lent she accidentally left them in a torsca in Paris in 1960 this would have probably been 1965 and then she told her friend, Michelle glords, who was produced at EMI France, the record company EMI France, which is now Warner Music, she told him, I was completely overturned. I saw my colleagues, I saw the props, I saw the audience members scratching their heads. I was she said I was literally overturned. And I was shocked. And you know, she was horrified, because she felt so exposed. Because, other than that, she would come on stage before every before, well, yeah, during rehearsal, she would create a mental map of all the props in her head, because she had to know where everything was not, so as not to bump into everything, bump into anything. At one point, actually, her friend Stelios galatapos, who’s a music critic. Who then actually wrote one of the, one of the better books about her, quite a quite a good book about her. Remembered she was playing Medea, and she lost the dagger, the dagger she was using to kill her children. She lost it at some point, and she had to feel for it. And the way she felt for it was remembering where that the sound of the metal falling had landed by ear. I mean, that’s

Dan LeFebvre  30:22

impressive. I mean, just being able to remember all of that for each performance, because I’m sure you know, the stages in around the world that she’s performing are going to be different every time, and I don’t have that kind of memory either, wow. Well, if we go back to the if we go back to the movie. You already talked about some of this, but the way that the movie shows her being forced to stop singing, she we don’t see it happening, but she visits this theater to privately practice. There’s only one guy there who’s playing piano for he’s never really named in the movie. By looking at the cast listing, it’s Steven ashfield’s character, Jeffrey Tate, and Maria tells him that her last performance was in Japan about four and a half years before the time of the movie, she got a hernia. Her legs turned purple as you talked about it not happening, and everything swelled up. We don’t see that happening, but then we do see a scene with Maria burning her theater dresses at her home in Milan, which movie seems to suggest was a symbolic gesture of marking the end of her career. How well does the movie do telling the end of her career, although, as you mentioned earlier, her career never really seemed to end. So I feel like I already answered that one.

Sophia Lambton  31:34

Yeah, it’s, this is all very mixed up, because it’s not based it’s it’s taken various elements out of context that have nothing to do with so there’s her vocal decline, and then there’s a whole costume burning thing. So it’s true that she burned her costumes, but it had nothing to do with her vocal decline, and it had nothing to do with the progression, or, on the contrary, the devolution of her career. So Rhea Callis had a very interesting career until 1953 until about the spring of 1953 she was a very, very heavy woman. I don’t know. Did you? Did you know this? Dan, so she was very, very overweight from about the age of 18, 1718, because she wasn’t an overweight teenager at all. Rather, she wasn’t overweight young teenager child. But she then gained a lot of weight, and so she was a very, very heavy woman. And then in about spring of 1953 she realized that she couldn’t carry on that way, because firstly, was just she found it, you know, she was not a very well woman in general, and she found logging around her weight difficult. And she also needed the chin for expression. She was singing the role of Medea in Florence in 1953 conducted by Leonard Bernstein, whom she had personally recruited, having heard him on the radio, and she needed the chin for expression, so she decided to lose weight, and she lost about 95 pounds in the span of 18 months. So that’s a lot, and that’s why there’s been a lot of deliberation. Did that affect her voice? That’s a whole other topic. But just going through her perspective of things when she was overweight, that was also very early on in her career, and she was starring in really tacky opera houses where, I mean, when she was in Sicily, in Palermo, I think it was, maybe it was a Catania, I don’t know, but when she was in Sicily, the opera house actually called her two hours before the performance to remind her she had a performance, and she was so she was outraged by the idea that she had to be reminded she would write to her husband. Can you believe it? This is how well organized they are that apparently their other singers don’t remember their singing tonight. So khaki opera houses, very cheap productions, including very cheap costume, she said, stank of sweat, insinuating that they hadn’t even been washed after their previous wear by the previous hanger. Yeah. The director Lucchino Visconti, who was is most more famous for his films the leopard and Death in Venice, was also an opera director because of her. He actually said, I staged opera for callous, not because of callous, he said for callous. And the first time he saw her was in Wagner’s Parsifal. And he said she was wearing something that looked like a bra and a pillbox hat on her head that kept falling on her nose as she sang. So this was a period of her career, very early on, when she was relegated to wearing tacky stuff. Eventually, she actually asked her husband, menegas mother to supply some costumes, and she would eventually bring some of her own costumes, because she did not like what she was being given when she burnt costumes. It was not the costume shown in this movie, at least, at least what they were implying. She burnt the costumes from what she knew as her overweight period, her tacky period, her I haven’t developed as an artist yet, period. And she talked about Efrain in a French interview in 1965 which is where they got this information from. She said. That the past that I didn’t like that is to say it was before the birth. My birth artistically. So once tastes change, the body changes, one changes artistically. And I’ve read the screenplay of this movie because it came out before the film itself. It was published a deadline, and in the screenplay, it said among it had tags on the costumes, and it included Anna Bolena by Don it SETI. She would never have burnt the Anna Bolena costume because that was a Latino Visconti reduction. That was a gorgeous dress, and she I mean, so this refers to costumes from a completely different era, costumes from a completely different part of her career, where she looked different, she felt different, and she also sang differently. So that’s a whole other topic. But in the early part of her career, she was not as tailored, and she would be over dramatic. She would do vulgar things with the voice, and then she she really wanted to to worship and honor the music, and she tried to doing she really wanted to devote us up to doing exactly what the score required, and not what she would call pyrotechnics. So not fireworks, not, you know, adding a high note just so the audience would be impressed. That’s the costume burning thing. In terms of her vocal decline, that’s a very different subject. So she noticed it as early as about August 1954 when she was recording Verdi’s La forsa del distino in Milan, and she later that night at beefy restaurant, which is the restaurant at La Scala. It’s since been renamed, but it was traditionally known as beefy. She asked the prana, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, who was also the wife of EMI records producer Walter Lech, to touch her diaphragm, and she performed a high a. She said, Elizabeth, can you ask? Can you teach me how to perform this high a so it doesn’t wobble, because Walter, her husband, Walter, the EMI producer who was overseeing the record la Ford del distino, Walter says mine make him seasick. So even as early as that, when she had lost weight, well, shall we say, about a year that she started to lose she had started to lose weight about a year and a half before. So this was shortly after she lost weight. And that problem became more and more and more prevalent as she got older. But I’m saying older. I mean the first time, you know, in August 1954 this was a 30 year old woman. So she was not old, she wasn’t even middle aged. She was still very young. By january 19, sorry, by March 1959, she was really, really struggling. And the 10 of Ferruccio talevini, who sang with her on her second record of Lucia de Lama more, said she kept singing the same E flat and she kept cracking it when they were recording the the opera she was she tried and tried and she kept cracking the E flat, the top E flat, and she would soon start seeing less and less because of that. Simultaneously, she had been having problems with opera houses, partly on account of her husband, partly on account of the high standards she expected of them. And she had actually said, way back in September 58 she had said, in about a year’s time, I will probably retire, or at least I will sing a lot less because I don’t understand, I don’t understand the purpose of singing in conditions that are not, you know, conditions that are not optimal. She meant the various opera houses that she said wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her enough rehearsals, not just her, but wouldn’t give the company enough rehearsals. She specifically spoke of the met in New York, saying, I’m not the only one dissatisfied with the way they work. You know, for instance, not having enough rehearsals. For instance, introducing me to my baritone and La Traviata a few hours before we have to go on stage to perform it. Giuseppe de Stefano doesn’t sing there. Elizabeth Schwartzkopf doesn’t sing there, and Eileen Farrell doesn’t sing there. So, you know, I’m not the only one dissatisfied. It’s just that the media lights on to me. And then so she was having vocal promissory on 1959 that happened to coincide with the time when her husband left her and she later paired off with an asses. She also had sinusitis, which she said was very bad, because it was like she said, the pus dripped onto my vocal cords and blocked the sound chambers, and I felt like a deaf man who shouts because he can’t hear himself anymore. And she had several hernias, and one of them, she said she she had, well, she had an operation for the sinusitis in December, 1961 she had an operation for the hernia in january 1963 but then she got another hernia. At the same time, she was having terrible problems with blood pressure, because she felt so stressed that by this time when she would perform, her blood pressure would just tank hours before the performance. So at one point, as I mentioned earlier, she had to give a norma with a blood pressure of 70 over 50, and her friend Stella tapos said she could barely walk on stage, but she was going through it because she didn’t want media to say, callus abandons performance. Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s bizarre. It’s really bizarre because actually, even from a tabloid perspective, they could have said callous almost kills herself trying to sing, right? Callus almost faints. But instead of that, it was all about, oh, callus is being a diva. Or in that, you know, in that case, there was some dramatization of her fans in the audience that there were anti callous people or pro callus people, and it was all about their feud.

Sophia Lambton  40:25

But she quite soon realized, by 1964 she was saying that the first hernia, she said, it knocked me out so much I damaged the muscles of my abdomen, which naturally drained my strength and affected my singing apparatus, to which the abdomen and diaphragm are as much apart as the vocal cords. So she had hoped the operation would improve things. Immediately following her operation, in january 1963 she had a tape recorder, and she was listening to herself obsessively, but that didn’t improve things. On the contrary, she got another diaphragm. Sorry, another diaphragm. What? She got another hernia, which was in the diaphragm. She got another hernia, which was in the diaphragm. And by the time her concert tour, which took place, not in this movie, they said, four and a half years, or something, her last performance as part of her concert tour, which was her last performance ever, was in November 74 so it was only two years and 10 months before she died. It was not four and a half years. She was in terrible pain after that because she said, Probably I’m working my diaphragm more and better and it starts kicking. Also, after that performance, she had labyrinth, it’s which is an infection of a labyrinth in the inner ear. She said, I couldn’t stand straight or sit straight for 12 hours, or see or see for nearly 12 hours. So I don’t know why. In this film, they made up something about purple legs. Weird. Because, to be honest, even if they wanted to be ultra dramatic, they could have used this stuff. A lot of it isn’t new to my book, either. It’s it’s been out there for a while. This information,

Dan LeFebvre  42:03

I think it kind of tells a gives an idea of how accurate a movie is when in that in that case, like, she’s telling the story, we don’t even see it on screen. But even saying four and a half years, as opposed to a couple years, like, it’s so easy to change that dialog and make it just a little bit more accurate, but for some reason, they don’t do that. And I mean, unfortunately, there’s movies that do that.

Sophia Lambton  42:29

But bizarrely, in the screenplay, it talks about 19 June, 1959 and it says it introduced the husband, many Guinea, and it says in the screenplay, a man in his 40s, and by that time, he would have been 63, years old. Bizarre, quite bizarre. I don’t get it to say the least, yeah. Well, if

Dan LeFebvre  42:53

we circle back to like when she was telling that story, she was telling it to the Jeffrey Tate character. And there’s another thing I found interesting, because Maria in that specifically says he is not a repetitier. But correct me, if I’m wrong, he actually was, and you had an opportunity to interview him before he passed in 2017 so can you share a little bit more about the real Jeffrey Tate that we don’t get in the movie?

Sophia Lambton  43:19

Yeah, I was really surprised that a film about Marie cows would include a fictional Jeffrey Tate, because Jeffrey Tate worked with her for six weeks of all the collaborators with whom she worked, he worked with her perhaps the least even. I mean, even in her last years. I assume they did that, because first he was English, so they didn’t need to get a French person, you know, I mean, her main vocal, vocal coach then was Janine Rice, who is a lovely, lovely French lady who might my first interviewee, who’s also gone. Now she’s passed away, but I presume they didn’t want to use her, because that would have been a French woman speaking English with with a French accent, even though they spoke French in real life, because calla spoke French, Italian English on Italian, English on Greek. But Jeffrey Tate I in advance of this film, I listened to my interview of him again because I hadn’t in ages. I interviewed him in january 2014, he was a repetitor. He works for the Royal House here in London. He was recruited to work with her, even though Italian music and Italian opera in general wasn’t his specialty. He preferred German music so leader and and operas by Wagner. I think he also preferred Baroque music so callous his favorites of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi were not his specialty, but she was considering singing Cavalier rusticana at the Royal Opera House. Now this was in March 1976 it had nothing to do with the last week or even the last month or even the last year of her life. They only worked together for four to six weeks. He said he was very, very shy with her, and I have to say that when I saw his portrayal in this film, I felt really sorry, not just. For callous, who’s obviously being I don’t know what is going on, because that’s got nothing to do with her. But for Jeffrey Tate, this conductor, he later became a conductor for Jeffrey Tate, whose partner is still alive, as far as I know, and the bizarre realm in which Jeffrey Tate, who came as a very young, very shy, repertor, very scary, scared of this big, you know, big name of callous being portrayed as thomp, I would say, quite arrogant character. They did warm to each other, meaning, he felt free with her. So eventually he said I could treat her as any other normal singer. He I could say Maria, that was flat. Try that again. She was very determined to work hard. He called her extremely nice. Um, he they, he said they didn’t talk about because I deliberately listened to my truth him. They’d never talked about personal stuff. She’s, I mean, occasionally she might mention analysis, but she never said anything specific. And I, I really pushed him on this, you know, are you sure she didn’t say anything specifically on Onassis or Pasolini? You know? And he said, No, no, she we didn’t know each other long enough for that to even occur. We stopped mainly to the mezzo repertoire because her voice was in a really bad way then. And he said she was never harsh, never difficult. He called her again about five to six months after their initial collaboration, asking if she wanted to resume, and she said that she would be back in touch or probably later on. He said, When I called, when I ran her up again, she was extremely nice. So they, typically, they would only work together up in a theater, which was the teaser. Once a week she was allowed access to that theater because the manager, char Dan, had given her access, probably because she had contacts in EMI. Otherwise they worked in her apartment. But it wasn’t as dramatic as as it’s portrayed. And also I still find it weird that he was even, that even a fictional version of him was included in the film.

Dan LeFebvre  47:07

And the way you mentioned it, like they didn’t talk about personal stuff, but in the movie, the impression that I got, I don’t remember the exact line of dialog, but she meant mentioned something about about him, and immediately the Jeffrey Tate character knows who she’s talking about, which implies to me that they have this whole kind of personal connection and background like that she knows that, or he knows that she’s talking about Onassis and all you know, it’s like they start to get very personal very quickly in those discussions in the movie, which implies there’s this whole backstory that wasn’t there in real life. Um,

Sophia Lambton  47:41

well, it was only then so far as everybody who had heard of Marie callus by that point associated her with onas. But I do want to say because obviously I have seen the movie, and it’s definitely not the first instance of a portrayal of Marie callus as saying, oh, Onassis forbade me to sing. That is not only incorrect, but it’s kind of the opposite of the truth. Because when she first began, I would say her friendship with Manassas, because she wasn’t together with him for a while, primarily because, as I mentioned earlier, she really wasn’t interested in romance. She wasn’t a very sexual being. And that’s a whole other subject. But I mean, there are nine separate sources, including callous herself, who attest to the who say something suggests that, strongly suggestive of of the fact that she wasn’t really that much intersex. So when people portray the callous analysis relationship as this big affair, it’s not true. First of all, not because Marie Callis was such a good person. And, I mean, she was, she tried her best to be a good person. But I’m saying it’s not true primarily because she just, she wasn’t interested in that, in that kind of thing. I mean, you know, when she met Onassis, she she later would, remember, I was rather indifferent to him. She wasn’t looking to have an adult an adulterous affair. She wasn’t looking to leave her husband. And even though she and many were having difficulties, she actually what she tried to salvage that marriage. But anyway, going back to Onassis for the moment, he was working with her to try to get her some role at the Monte Carlo opera so she could sing there wherever she wanted. He eventually tried to found a Marie Callis television production company with his friend who Roberto Arias, who was the ambassador, the British ambassador to Panama, also the husband of ballerina Margo Fontaine. But for some reason he was good in finance. So that’s why NASA approached him, because Anas could see Carlos was going through terrible strain, both vocal strain, but also psychological strain as a result of the vocal strain, and he thought performing in a pre recorded environment would be less stressful for her, but she didn’t like that. She always preferred life stage. She didn’t really, she didn’t really like pre recorded anything that much. And Onassis also, it has been multiple times alleged that Onassis did not want her to star in a film of Tosca, but that’s actually the opposite. He was the one working harder than she was on that because she didn’t like the idea of starring in Tosca, but he communicated with Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, so I. Found a letter of him, of his to Jack Warner, that had actually not it’s never been published before, and he communicated with Spyro scurris, the chairman of 20th Century Fox, trying to incentivize callous to do a film of Tosca later on, when their relationship soured. That happened at a time when both he was having terrible bad luck in his business. So he had lost all his stocks in the associated de van de mer, which is this big, big conglomerate in Monaco, which is where he was mostly based. At least his business was based at the time thing. And also his airline, Olympic airways, was making terrible, terrible losses. And actually, council would remember to her friend Surya, who wrote a diary entry about this, he would she would say, he’s so nervous. He’s so frat he, she said, fragile, unstable man. I tell him go and see a doctor about your nerves. He says, It’s not the business of a doctor. And she would complain about that to her friend Leo Lerman as well. She would say, He’s so stubborn, I would tell him he needs to see a doctor because he’s so anxious. He has anxiety. He can’t say I have anxiety. So, you know, you had a situation where they’ve been together already for I mean, I think things were especially going bad, and by the spring of 67 so they’d been together for at least seven and a half, well, about seven years, depending on where you begin to count their relationship. But over seven years, and his career is in the pits, her career is in the pits, and obviously they’re very, very insecure, so she eventually dumped him, because they were tired of each other, and she herself remembered in reference to the relationship, familiarity breeds contempt. He did not forbid her from singing. But what I will admit is that after they split, as you know, three months later, he married Jacqueline Kennedy. She was very hurt, despite the fact that he had tried to call her many, many times, and she had not taken his calls. So I’m not sure how he had told her if she was blanking him all the time, but no, I understand she was hurt. Obviously she was blindsided by this, but she she used a lot of the performative energy she wasn’t using on stage because of her vocal decline, in very long rants about Onassis and some stuff about their arguments was true. Yeah, obviously they in their spots, they said some unpleasant things to each other, but other times she would say stuff like, here we only ever had his friends on the yacht, not my friends. And that was totally untrue, because she had had her best friend of a time, John nawatsu There, the conductor Herbert von Karajan, who actually said he was best friends with Onassis than callus and Onassis actually they had had a spat about Lucia dinamimore and Onassis had actually reconciled them after they hadn’t spoken to each other for a while, and Princess Grace had always been callous friend and Frank, as efrali Callis had friend had been on on the Christina, and so had the conductor, Josh Kretz, one of her favorite conductors, who had rehearsed with her there using the Steinway and Asus had had commissioned to withstand dump the Steinway piano that he had had commissions so the callous could practice on his yacht, withstanding the dump. And I spoke to his step niece, Marilena Patroni colas, who was about 16 the time when she was spending time on the Christina. And she remembered, generally, most people who knew callous of time remembered her practicing on the Christina. Both Marilena, his step niece, and also his and callous physiotherapist COVID espanidou, told me how much Onassis liked castaiva. Told me he liked Bucha. It is true that he wasn’t a big opera fan, but it is completely untrue to say he forbade me from singing because he didn’t do that. Why would he have done that? That’s crazy.

Dan LeFebvre  53:34

Yeah, mentioning him forbidding her to sing, that leads to another question that I have for you about something that’s portrayed in the movie, because in the movie there, it’s implying that her career is over, but she’s still trying to get it back into singing. There’s, I think, a line where she mentioned that her mother made her sing, and then Onassis forbade her to sing, and now she’s finally singing for herself so, but she also mentioned that she wasn’t going to perform for anybody. So the impression that I got just watching the movie was she still wanted to sing, because it was just so deeply ingrained into who she was that maybe she felt lost without being able to sing. Is it true that she was still trying to sing, even if it was not to ever perform on stage?

Sophia Lambton  54:19

Yeah, she sang all the time. And if there’s you know, I have tried resisting speculation about her vocal decline. I do want to resist speculation because, other than the fact that her stomach muscles were damaged, we can’t really say why that was, but I still think she worked too hard, if anything, for her. Have got her own health for the blood pressure that was really low. She herself said, when I’m alone with a score, that’s where I find my true self. But how can one bring paradise to Earth? That’s why I’m also obligated to live another life. So in terms of her mother making her sing, I did touch on that briefly earlier. Her, yes, it’s true. Her mother pushed her from a very from callus, very early years. But Carlos also pushed herself. And then once she was really completely, you know, enslaved to music, she pushed herself really, really, really hard. Late in her life, she did contribute herself a bit because she didn’t know what or whom to blame for her decline. So sometimes she would say, Oh, my mother made me sing. And at other times she would say, manegini made me sing. And you know, I guess you can say that was kind of true, but she was the one making her, making herself sing more than anybody else. So you can’t really attribute all of that to her mother or to maneu. And when she was with an Assa, she was singing less because of her vocal decline. And she there were times when she may have tried to convince herself that at least she had Onassis. And, you know, maybe she’s trying to see this other side of life and in love and relationships. But she was bored. She would she would get bored because, you know, late is 1970 after 1970 so she had left an asset in July 68 and in a 1970 interview, she says, what is there in life if you don’t work, you can only live on work by work, through work, without work. There are only a few sensations, and you can’t live off them. And it’s true, she was really having an identity crisis without the opportunity of performing. Yet she was considering engagements all the time. She was considering them all the time. She would get nervous so throughout all the years, and she was considering engagements, including in 1963 she was considering she was going to do Macbeth, but she didn’t. She was going to do Trevor Tory, but she didn’t. Sorry, Macbeth, I think she was going to do in 59 but she’d be at Macbeth was going to be 59 and then there’s a room about 63 she’s going to do Trevor Tory in 63 but she didn’t. I found correspondence between her and her manager signed a golden ski at the Victoria and Albert news. And Albert Museum here in London, which had bizarrely never been uncovered. Which is quite funny, because he was saying the Victoria Albert Museum is a quite major institution. And gorlinski really detailed what she was considering doing at various points. And there was so much that hadn’t been in the public eye, so she was considering an American tour in 1963 but she was so nervous that at first she’d say, Okay, let’s postpone it, because I’m not ready. And then it would be, well, I know we were going to start in New York with the tour, but can we start in Philadelphia or Washington? Because there’d be, there’ll be too much, but the nerves will be too much in New York, because there’ll be all this publicity in New York. So let’s start at a less, you know, less prestigious city, less visited city, and then eventually would get canceled. So if we actually go to her final performance in November 74 she did consider many things after that, because she stopped at that point. I mentioned she had LeBron. She had terrible pain from her hernia, and she she was diagnosed with labyrinth. It’s an infection of the inner ear. But her partner both actually at that point in life and in the concert tour, Giuseppe Di Stefano continued with the accompanist Robert Sutherland. They went on to perform in Australia. When she returned to Paris, she was going to do Tosca with him. She was planning it for a very long time, but eventually she sang the second act in front of her friend, the costume designer Umberto tirelli The teata del opera in Rome in May or June, 75 she saw he wasn’t very impressed, and she thought, I’m I’m not up for this. There was a rumor she was going to sing with the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra in LA in January, 76 and then in March 76 Jeffrey Tate visited her to practice for a potential Cavalier ruscana at the Royal Opera House. She never did. She was practicing with her vocal coach, Janine rice, the role of Charlotte in basnes vertell. She was hoping to do a recording of this opera she had never fully performed before. She recorded, it’s a letter Aria. It’s an air delet a letter ARIA for a compilation album. But she had never recorded the full opera Verde, and she really wanted to do that. She was working on that two days before her death, and her vocal coach, Janine Weiss, traveled to New York for some work, I think, with Herbert von carrion, carrying luggage full of scores, full of opera scores. And when she arrived at the airport, a porter took the luggage and said, Oh, you’ve got a really heavy suitcase. Are you in fashion? Because he thought maybe she was carrying fur coats, I guess, or something, or outfits. She said, No, I’m an opera you know, these are schools. And he said, Oh, did you know a very famous opera singer died today? And she was she said, No, who was that? And she and he said, Marie Callis and Janine rice learnt about the death of her friend and student from a porter at an airport. You know, people really shocked, because, as I mentioned earlier, yes, she was definitely less social than she hadn’t previously. She was definitely extremely dismal. And Jeffrey Tate did tell me that her attitude, although she he said he did want to precise. She didn’t run people down. She ran the whole world down. So she had that, you know, attitude of an older person. Everything’s changed. Nothing is good anymore. But she didn’t, she didn’t run people down. She didn’t say, oh, remember him. He was terrible. She didn’t do that. He said she had. She felt like a 79 or 80 year old woman. In how completely dispirited she felt, but she was in touch with various people up to the day of her death, so she did not close herself up away from everybody else. She was singing. She wanted to sing and but her most horrifying thing was how her voice just got worse and worse, despite her continuous attempts to improve it.

Dan LeFebvre  1:00:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, like you said, like the I think what’s life without work? I mean, I feel like that’s a any, anybody who is a workaholic, and you know, focus is so hard, and you have to do that, to get to the level that she was. But I think that’s it’s it’s normal to to do that, and then with on top of all the all these medical things that you know, she’s just still pushing herself, despite that, I can see how it can be very it’s got to be so disheartening, because you you remember the way you were, but your body just isn’t able to do that anymore, and so you just want to keep pushing harder and keep practicing and keep doing that. But it sounds like that was her body failing her in ways like that, even though she’s, you know, keep pushing. Yeah. Well, a moment ago, I mentioned with Maria feeling lost, but in the movie, there are some flashbacks that we get that give another indication that maybe there’s something else that makes her feel lost, beyond the ability to perform on stage. And specifically, there is a flashback that we see with a room with Maria, her sister and her mother. There’s two soldiers that enter the room wearing Nazi uniforms, Maria and her sister are forced to sing for the soldiers they pay her mother for that private performance. And in the movie, Maria mentions that’s where it all began. And I’m assuming that that’s talking about kind of her mother forcing her to sing, and that kind of career starting, there was that a moment where she started performing first.

Sophia Lambton  1:02:04

No, not at all, not at all. She started performing first when her mother entered her into radio contest back in New York, and she didn’t win any of them, but she got some kind of compensatory prize. I don’t think, I don’t think she actually said if it was second prize or third prize. She won a Bulava with wristwatch because Jack Benny. Do you know Jack Benny? Yeah, Jack Benny was one of the judges, right? Well, Jack Benny was in the judges, and he apparently voted for her, but, but not many of the others did. So he she won some kind of runner up prize, and she never forgot that Jack Benny had been partly responsible for her winning a bit of a wristwatch at a radio contest when she was 11 years old. But the first role she sang she sang at the age of 15, and that was Dan Tutsi Cana. That’s the same opera that she was hoping to sing when practicing with Jeffrey Tade in 1976 she made her professional debut on July 4, 1938 in a celebration of the American Independence Day in Athens. And she, back then, would have been 14, yeah. July 38 she was 14 Yeah. She signed her first professional contract with a National Theater the age of 16, and she was given just a swarm of chain for performances. By the age of 18, she was seeing Tosca in a professional production. So she spent the war earning, you can’t really call it money. She was pretty much earning food as a result of performance. She now evangelio was, it is true, she was a very unsympathetic, negligent woman. She wasn’t really much of a parent at all. Later on, she had various psychological problems. She wanted her daughters to get money any which way. That’s true, but she did not ask them to prostitute themselves at all. I mean, how could she even have what she did, what she would say? Well, you know, socialize with the soldiers, meaning, go get food, not not become I mean, obviously we’re looking at a very extreme context when a lot of people did things so they would never have done ordinarily for their own survival. But thankfully, callous did not have to sleep with anybody to get money or food. The only thing she ever mentioned about her mother trying to set her and Jackie up in that context was that her mother made her go out with a German soldier, and Carlos was so anguish, she started crying, and the German soldier took pity on her and gave her, I think, some spaghetti anyway, or some of some food. Other than that, I’d like to mention what she actually did do in the war, other than performing. And I mean, she really became a team player during wartime. I’m sure she was one before, but that really war time is obviously a very, very extreme, especially in Athens, first during World War Two, then during their civil war, she would hike for miles and miles, not hike, but walk rather. Maybe she did hike as well. I don’t know. I would imagine. Well, Athens is quite hilly, but anyway, what I mean is she would walk for. Miles and miles to get cabbage leaves and tomatoes for herself or her family for her colleagues, she would barter the complimentary opera ticket she had at the National Theater, both hers and her colleagues for food for herself and for the company. She persuaded some kind of anti Nazi to sign a food warrant for the company, because they were being paid in food, but they were being paid something like less than a meal a day. So she went through a very, very hard time, but she did not have any kind of childhood trauma from any kind of sexual abuse, thankfully, thankfully, because I think her childhood was hard enough. No, I I’m pretty sure she was a virgin up to, actually, when she met manygini, which would have been much later, when she was 20. I mean, I’m, I can’t for sure say when Cal’s lost a virginity, but she it wasn’t in Athens. And also, as I mentioned earlier, yeah, she wasn’t particularly interested in sex. And she was actually 18 years old, the first time she had she heard of how babies were born, meaning the first time she realized what reproduction is, as in, she found out because no one had told her. No one had told her. This is Athens wartime. There isn’t a TV. She’s not going to hear about stuff on the radio at that point, you know who’s going to tell her? She could only have learned on her own experience and had. The flirtation she had with men at that time didn’t really amount to much, so all three men who were in close proximity to her. There was a Greek businessman, tech is cigars. There’s a British soldier, Ray Morgan, and there was a doctor called elusive testus. He was more like a father figure. All three men commented, not to me, because they they died. I think all of them, maybe Ray Morgan is still alive, but they told the boba for Nicholas, but Salus the omidys, back in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, how she really didn’t have much interest in physical intimacy. She did she perform for the Germans? Well, she she performed for the Germans because the whole company was performing in front of the Germans. But she and Jackie never performed. I never, I don’t remember ever reading about her and Jackie singing together. Now, Jackie didn’t want to be an opera sing. That’s true. And to begin with, evangelio was trying to push Jackie into a career, but when Evan Jenny understood that Maria was the real singer, she kind of forgot all about Jackie’s abilities. Jackie, meanwhile, was doing perfectly fine, not perfectly fine. That’s badly put. Jackie was okay, relatively because she had hooked up with a guy called Milton empiricus, who really helped both Jackie and Maria and the whole family in terms of food provisions and supplies during the war. I don’t remember why, but he had some connections, so that helped so she didn’t have to go out and prostitute herself. And that’s that’s just a big fabrication that’s based on the fact that, yeah, at one point, Maria mentioned, my mother asked me to go out with a German Sultan, but not to, I don’t think even evangelio would have specified sleep with a German soldier. I don’t think she would have even said that. Um, so, I mean, there is an interesting moment from the period when the was the Greek, like, who was the Greek Air Force, or they were asked, yeah. Members of the Greek Air Force asked Evangelia and Jackie Henri, who all lived in the same apartment on petition Street, to hide two British members of the Air Force, John Atkinson and some man called Robert. And they did. And then at some point, when Italian soldiers barged in, they wanted to inspect the apartment, and in order to distract them, Maria sat down and played on the piano and started to sing to distract them from the search. So there were definitely really horrible moments. There were definitely close calls, but, and she did say, she did say they were very, very sad war years, and it was hard for her to talk to them, but she also said I was in no way harassed by the Germans. She said this in an interview to the German magazine de spigo in 1957 think 57 she said I was in no way harassed by the Germans, even though I had an American passport. And at another point she said, Well, it was hard, but hardship does one good. Now, of course, she went through very difficult times. She went through harder times during the civil war in Athens. Now, the Civil War was between homes. Get this wrong, the National Liberation Army, the National Liberation Front, sorry, the National Liberation Front and the Greek People’s Liberation Army. The National Liberation Front was a resistance group. The Greek People’s Liberation Army was a group of communists. So the Greek People’s Liberation Army were the communists known as the reds, the National Liberation Front, when they were known as the whites, and they were supported by the British, by the Allied Forces. She lived in the red zone, so the danger zone, and then she began work at the British headquarters, where she was in charge of distributing secret mail. And they were in the white zone, so she had to make this very dangerous journey every day to work to earn some money. Meanwhile, Jackie got a job translating film titles from Greek into English. I assume vice versa. So they were, they were very, very difficult years for them. But cars also continued performing. She sang Fidelio. Uh, in Greek. Isn’t Greek. I’m blanking here. It couldn’t have been in German, because she never sang in German. I’m pretty sure it was in Greek, um, and she sang Tosca. And at one point in July 43 she actually double booked herself, by accident. She had a concert, and then she had a Tosca. So she had, she sang arias from Han or Rossini and your son, Milan Chela, from Chile’s Adrian le COVID, at a theater on in the customers through she sang at the customers through theater. Then she ran through wartime Athens to clafuna square to enter as Tosca just in time for when Tosca enters opera. Boss, listening will know this, Mario, Mario, Mario. And she got there just in time. So not at the start of the opera, but at toss was entrance. So yes, they were very, very painful years. But I don’t think she suffered from childhood trauma from that. I think if anything, she felt obviously she was forever traumatized by the fact that her mother didn’t love her. That was horrible. And those problems persisted into her later life, she had troubles with her sister as well, and even her father let her down eventually. And this was all terrible, and that was why, you know, I mentioned at the start, I think, or earlier on, she married a man who was 28 years a senior. He was not attractive, he was quite overweight, he was bald. He didn’t like opera either. He actually fell asleep sitting at her studio recording of Norma in 1954 one of the most famous records ever, including her signature, Aria Casta Diva, which today, I think, is used, still used in the Jean Paul Gaultier ad and he fell asleep. But she needed a father figure, and in her pursuit of a career. Obviously, she had traveled, you know, she went from Athens back to New York and then to Italy. She didn’t know that many people. She didn’t have a best friend, her mother. She was still in touch with her mother when she came to Italy. She was still trying to, you know, trying to preserve that relationship, but she always had doubts about her mother’s love, and she marries this guy who ends up actually being terrible for her and terrible for her and terrible for her reputation

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:04

as well. Yeah. Well, speaking of her family, that we do see little bits and pieces with her family in the movie, with her mother, like I mentioned that flashback, we only really see her in the negative flashback. So the impression I get with Maria’s relationship with her mother was not a good one. I think there’s a line of dialog in the movie where she talks about remembering the day that she finally told her mother to off, but she’s still in contact with her sister, because we see her in the movie and then the only mention of her father. There’s a scene where she’s talking with JFK and her father, or JFK talks about the father she never had. Do you think the movie did a decent job portraying the relationship between Maria and her family.

Sophia Lambton  1:12:44

Well, first of all, I’d like to say that Maria Kellis would never tell anybody to f off, because she was a goody goody who actually couldn’t stand cursing. She couldn’t stand cursing. And when, when the director, Lucchino Visconti, would swear during the rehearsals, it turned her stomach, because that’s what Houseman menaghini said. And in this regard, I think this regard, I think he was, he was probably telling the truth. Also, Richard Burton mentioned in his diary how, because Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were friends with her, she was at their place, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and his niece Caroline, were playing Gin Rummy, uh, Elizabeth Taylor said at one point and callous was aghast. And according to Richard Burton, she said, Oh no, I’ve never heard such words. Never heard such things. And he and Elizabeth Taylor were very surprised that she was so surprised herself. So I really dislike that, because she would have hated that. And you know, there’s been a lot of Fictional portrayals of her, there’s been, there have been a lot of inaccurate biographies, but very few have actually portrayed her as being somebody who curses. Because everyone, not everyone, of course, not everyone. But very many people know that that was not the case. So with Evangelia, there are three, obviously. Do you have three members of her nuclear family? You have Evangelia, her mother? Oh, Evangelia was a very difficult person. It wasn’t clear in the movie at all why there was a discordance between them. Um, so Evangelia, obviously, as I’ve said, really wanted to milk callous, also Jackie, but more, most of all, callus, because she was the one with the talent. Financially. Evangelio was an entrepreneurial woman. She wanted her daughter to be making lots of money, and she wanted her share of that money. Um, money. So they had difficulties, because evangelio would say, Oh, I have no money. Give me money. Carlos would give her money. And then Carl would find $1,000 under her mattress, which, at the time was a really huge amount of money. In 1950 you know, massive amounts of money, really. And not only that, it wasn’t just that evangelio was kind of black beating her. So she’d say, I’m going to tell you a secret about your father, because obviously Evangelia and George have even separated one very acromis terms. She was saying nasty things about George. She eventually wrote such a horrible letter that callus didn’t even want to share it with her husband, many Guinea. This was in about October 1950 when callous would have been 26 Greeks. She didn’t even want to share with Nagini. It was obviously written in Greek, and many Gini didn’t speak Greek or English, so he had that Greek letter translated into a talent, and she was so hurt by the many Guinea she couldn’t even reply. And many Gini replied. He wrote an Italian took his own letter to a Greek translator, and he said the letter was malicious, vindictive and offensive cannot be written. Those things cannot be written by good mother. So basically, she would just make really she would say really horrible things. I think the only thing in the movie, I believe this was said that actually was accurate, was that evangelist did at one point say, I brought you into the world to sustain me and your sister, so to financially maintain me and your sister, she did say something along those lines. At one point, callus just could not suffer that relationship, so she broke off contact. But she did actually financially support Evangelii and her sister Jackie, on and off until her death, because the because Evangelia was didn’t want to work when she did try working out, I need to try various things. She was trying to use the callous name as much as possible to make money. She went on the balls talk show, I think, talking about how, what an in grade her daughter was, she told lies to the press. And at one point, Keller said, at one point, the government, the New York, I think, Department of, I don’t remember what taxation now can be taxation, the New York Department of something, contacted Maria and said, your mother, you know, don’t have any money, so she had to send money over. But that was really painful. It was really painful relationship, because she understood quite not too early on, but she understood she was not particularly loved. Um, neither was Jackie, really. But going on to George for the moment, the father, who I don’t think was her father, mentioned in this fictional movie at all

Dan LeFebvre  1:17:01

the only, the only mention that I that I not by name, but JFK mentions a father who wasn’t there because he has all these CIA agents that found out about Maria. But that’s the only mention that I I remember in the movie. Totally

Sophia Lambton  1:17:15

bizarre, because Maria counts banning you. Met him. Met John F Kennedy once, and that was at the Madison Square Garden birthday celebration. Met him once publicly. It’s just an entirely fictional thing in this film. JFK would never have spoken on a personal level to Maria, not on that level. At least they barely knew

Dan LeFebvre  1:17:32

it seems, truly seems par for the course for this movie so far to make up fictional things.

Sophia Lambton  1:17:35

Yeah, but the going this far, I didn’t understand. I thought maybe it was trying to be a tongue in cheek thing or something. But why on earth John of Kent? Why on earth John F Kennedy, who had to be, to be to put in Marley, had bigger fish to fry, as we say in the UK, than concerning himself with Murray Callis life. But anyway, George the father was more kind of indolent and not really bothering. So he cared on some level for the girls, but he took long business trips, and he actually openly said that he preferred it that way, because he could be away from their mother. As I mentioned, evangelist took Maria and Jackie to Athens when Maria was 13, she wouldn’t see George until she would be 21 back in New York, and she did sustain a relationship with him. He came to see her sing several times in January, 1959 he saw her sing. He came to see him epidurals at the epidurals festival in August 1960 so they were on good terms. But then eventually he got ill, and she was happy to she was happy to foot his medical bills. But at some point his next wife, he married, he remarried. He remarried, a woman called Alexandra, Papa John and her family started bothering Rhea for money. And then Rhea started hearing from other people that George was going around Athens saying his daughter, his famous singer, daughter, was supporting him. And that really, really hurt her. So she cut herself from that. She cut herself off from that as well. There was just a lot of pain. I’m not saying maybe, maybe she could have made more than effort with her father, but having heard an issue with him, myself for the high Garden Show for NBC, high garden show from 1957 when he gets growth his daughter’s birthday is wrong. I don’t think you know being, I don’t think being on very good terms with him when he was demanding money as well, reminding Maria of her mother when she thought she could trust him, she actually ended up saying he has betrayed me even, perhaps even worse than my mother, because I think she was accustomed to who her mother was, but she’d been on such good terms with her father for years, he’d come to her performances, and Now it turns out he’s also bitching about her to other people. She was really hurt by that. Jackie is a bit her sister Jackie, that relationship is a bit more nebulous in that. The thing is, she tried to make contact with her sister Jackie, but Jackie was kind of on Evangelii side. And, you know, but we need money, and you’re making money. It’s. So she did sustain contact with her at a time when she wasn’t in contact with Jackie, the last time she sorry the other way, at a time when she wasn’t in contact with her mother, evangelio, she was still in contact with Jackie, on and off. The last time she ever saw her sister Jackie was in september 1960 so it was a long time before her death. It was 17 years before death. It is not entirely certain if it was september 1960 or 1961 because Jackie herself mistakenly referred to callous performances of Norma and Medea at Epidaurus taking place in the same summer, when they took place in different summers, 60 and 61 so I don’t know if it was September 60 or September 61 but it was one of those years, 16 to 17 years before her death, that was the last time they met face to face. She later no before that, she had way before that, November 1950 she had written to her godfather. As for my sister, I’ve tried to do my best, but that has only brought me insults. I don’t know what exactly she meant by that, but obviously it was difficult with Jackie as well. And then I get a very poor impression of Jackie from her own book, which is very nasty in that there’s a lot of bitterness about, you know, I wanted to be a singer too. If my life had been different, I would have been a great singer, like callous two. Jackie couldn’t, could sing a little bit she, there’s a recording of her, maybe still on YouTube. She gave an interview to a Marie callous fan club that was recorded in 1992 on videotape, and it was on YouTube. I don’t know if it still is. It probably is so and that during that interview, she played a recording herself singing in her youth. She did not have a great voice. She was never going to make a great, great career as an opera singer. She might have, if she had wanted, she might have made a bit of money singing at various, you know, restaurant venues, but this was not the voice of a great singer, so she had a lot of resentment against Maria. They were back in touch. After they were back in they came back into contact when George, the father, died in December 1972 so this would have been four years, nine months before Council’s death. And then they were on and off in contact, on the phone a little bit, and it is true that callus asked her to send mandrax pills from Athens because they were no longer in the mark on the market in France because she needed them to sleep. But there was nothing as dramatic as portrayed in the film. They never did meet up anytime after 60 or 61

Dan LeFebvre  1:22:17

okay, I’m sensing a kind of a trend with a lot of Maria’s relationships between her mother, who is saying things, you know, you mentioned going on a talk show and saying things about her, her father, even her first husband, you know, the manager who was saying things, did she have somebody that she could rely on throughout her life at all? It seems like everybody’s almost using her and trying to get money out of her, or whatever their purposes are, and then slandering her behind her back. Yeah,

Sophia Lambton  1:22:49

you make a really good point. Unfortunately, that really feels like the case. I haven’t even mentioned her longtime best friend, Joanna lomazzi, who wrote a series of articles in 1961 for an Italian magazine called La setsimana income about callous private life. Now, these articles are very useful to me because they came from the period, and I think she wasn’t lying, but she was outing the private life of her best friend for money. Wait, you know which was which was terrible. And then she was very surprised that after that, callus wasn’t much in contact with her, although she did actually write to her several years later. Yeah, so on one hand, callus was very unfortunate when it came to a lot of people, that’s true, but she had some good friends. They were just not, they were not part of her closest, most intimate circle. I mean, she had a lot of good colleagues. When I was interviewing various people, they said such lovely things. Janine Rice was just amazing. She was such a dear, dear woman. When I interviewed Fabrizio Milano, who is still an opera director, he was the assistant to her when she and Giuseppe Stefano stage ver dive siciliani in Turin in 1970 three. At the end, after I interviewed, when I was leaving, he said, I really hope you write your book Sophia, because she was just such a wonderful woman and and I said, I know, I know. So she did have people who cared about her, but in terms of her closest relationships, yeah, yeah, she had bad luck. I will say, though, Onassis, in this regard, was by far the best person she had in her life. Because let me tell you about the things Onassis didn’t do analysis, didn’t love about her to the press at all, and at one point he actually said, because they had, they had a lawsuit against someone else who unfortunately let them down, rather the other way. Their dear friend panagivgoti sued them from a misunderstanding because he and Onassis had had bought Ray callus, a freighter, a ship called the artemision in 1965 and he and Anastas had an argument over how many shares he owned, versus Onassis owned, versus callous owned a. Eventually he sued, callous analysis, and then they and then, I always get confused about this, because, to be honest, is such a boring story. But anyway, there was they won, that lost, or they sued. No sorry, they had to sue him because he wasn’t handing over his shares. And it was afraid, and it was, it was a sorry story. Uh, but analysis during this lawsuit in in a London court said madam callus is not a vehicle for me to drive. She has her own brakes and her own brains. Uh, it’s very sad that it’s very sad that the media has portrayed him as believing the opposite. Um, he I mean, they stayed friends until the end. They did. They did not resume. It’s been what, it’s been quite widely reported, that they resume the romantic relationship after he married Jack and Kennedy. That is not true. He tried with her, but she wasn’t having it. As I mentioned before, she was not a very sexual woman. So I and also, by that time, you know, she was 40, so Okay, she wasn’t that old. She was 40. She was 44 when they split up. Okay, but as I mentioned, she wasn’t a very sexual woman. I don’t think she was going to have a sexual relationship with Manassas when he was married to Japanese I think she was tired of that relationship. I think she said it herself, many attributes contempt, and she did it also say to Stella Scott topless, uh, my relationship with NASA. So my affair with the NASA was, you know, did not end well, but my friendship with him was a great success. So they were much better when they were on the phone to each other. And, you know, these very independent individuals. I would also like to mention, because this never gets mentioned, they did not live together, which means that about half of the year they were kind of in a long distance relationship. So you’re talking about two individuals very focused on their careers. It’s quite a boring relationship, to be honest. And I say this as someone who I I’m also a novelist. I have a lifelong absolute fascination in relationships. I’ve made it my mission to seek out the most fascinating romantic relationships out there. This is not one of them at all. So I, when I went into my research years and years ago, I thought it was more interesting. No, no. Anyway, he they were in contact until his death, even though she was with Giuseppe Stefano. So he was quite Yeah, okay, it is true, he did cheat on her. He had various flings during the relationship, but she knew about that, and she also, in retrospect, talked about, okay, well, that was the way he was. She was, you know, she did not get broken by this. She was not broken by that. What others did is was far worse than anything Onassis did to her. There’s,

Dan LeFebvre  1:27:43

there’s a point in the movie where she kind of mentioned, I think it’s on when Onassis is on his deathbed, he calls her in and she talks about how when he married Jackie Kennedy, that he she wasn’t heartbroken, but she had her pride hurt. Do you think the movie did a good job portraying the relationship between Maria and Onassis.

Sophia Lambton  1:28:04

Well, I couldn’t I know, because any, any movie that alleges Onassis forbade her to sing is already completely overturning the representation of that relationship. Also any movie that has a fictional Maria Callas saying I did not want to go on the cruise because I knew, I knew what would happen. You know, in that melodramatic soap opera, soap opera kind of worse than Douglas Sirk, kind of tone, that isn’t what happened. Because, actually, she didn’t want to go because she didn’t want to go on the cruise. Her husband wanted them to go on the cruise because he thought they would make advantageous business contacts on the cruise. It was all about, oh, yeah, we need to meet. People need to network. I mean, I don’t think the term networking wasn’t used back then, but that would have that was what he would have said today. This was a time when he was making her sing, even though she was ill. And yeah, on that cruise in July to August, 59 Carl, Foreman producer, came and wanted to do, wanted her to do guns and Navarre, and she didn’t want to do it. A German producer came and want, no, I didn’t think a German producer came. But many Guinea was considering an offer from a German producer, producer for her to start as the leading lady in the Prima Donna, a German film that was going to be distributed by some big distributor called Gloria FinFET. Her fee would be 200 million lira, which is around $320,000 then, so about 303,300,000 today, or something, he would tell her land, land is what matters. And she did not agree with him at the same time, yes, Onassis was flirting with her. Of course he was flirting with her. She was beautiful one. She’s a beautiful woman. He liked women. We know that. Yeah, he liked women. I don’t think he had a big plan to seduce her, to be honest, because I don’t think he really was the kind who fell desperately in love like that, at least that quickly. I. Um, he was flirting with her me. Probably he was hoping that she would she and her husband would separate, but she had no idea. And um, eventually they disembarked that cruise on the 11th of August, 1959 for two weeks, she tried to assuage many Guinea’s resentment, because he was now saying, You’re cheating on me, or she wasn’t, and he, but he was primarily really angry. What has, what has spurred his anger about that which was untrue, what had, what had strengthened his suspicion was the fact that she was saying, I want to be my own manager. I want to manage my career after she had discovered he had invested primarily her money, because he was only her manager at this point. So she was making the earnings. You know, he was a manager. She was making the money. He had abandoned his own business, which was a brick making factory that had 12 plants across Italy. He had abandoned that. He was a family business. He had left it to his brothers. He had 11 brothers, and he had abandoned that. It was 11 brothers, 11 siblings. So I’d always get it up anyway. He was one of 12, one of 12 siblings. He’d left it to his brothers to become her manager, and now she was saying, I want to be my manager. He was really pissed off at this. Really pissed off. And furthermore, he didn’t remember. He didn’t speak English, he didn’t speak Greek, he didn’t speak French, and NASA spoke all of those languages, plus some others. He didn’t know what marinas was saying. He could tell that the other guests on the ship, including Churchill and his daughter and his granddaughter, were gossiping, saying, oh, counselor NASA, you know, really getting on? Well, that really enraged him, and eventually he started a rumor that they were having an affair, and he actually created a fake diary. He took letterheaded paper from their apartment in Milan and just wrote random dates on it in pen. And, you know, as though it could be a diary writing total untruths on it. And in July, 1960 CALS wrote a letter to her legal separation lawyer Augusto Calis calcini, which I found. I should also add, the reason why I say legal separation lawyer is because Italy did not have divorce at that time, divorce would be illegal in Italy until the end of 1970 In fact, one of the very first divorces granted. In fact, I believe the first divorce granted in Brescia, in the region of Brescia, was Maria Callas divorce finally, long after she had dumped Onassis, she finally could get divorced from many Guinea up to that point, they were legally separated, which means that the assets were divided between them. She would always say, Oh, he he went. She would put it differently, so I’m not exactly sure what the arrangement was, but in one letter, she’d say, mengini got half of my money, and another one, she’d say he got two thirds of my money. So he obviously got more than he was entitled to. But yeah, I was saying in a letter, 31st of July, 1960 she writes to her legal separation lawyer Augusto Carlos, or Augusto calzi cascalchini, saying, can you tell me again? His lawyer BME to tell him to put a muzzle on and stop lying to the press with that made up story about Onassis. She underlines, made up in Italian itstoria, invent data. And she underlines invent data, meaning he is telling the press on NASA and I have were having an affair. Now by that by that time, she and analysis were in a relationship, but they hadn’t been having an affair back then, which is why she’s saying Madoff story about analysis. She says, If he doesn’t, next time I meet with him, I will take a tape recorder to the meeting to get proof that he is lying. So, you know, talk about having nothing to hide in that regard, I think that the Cal Sanas relationship was primarily founded on two very strong individuals, self made individuals of Greek descent. I don’t think that was very important for Maria, because Maria had been born in America. She ended up dying in France, and actually her her primary language changed throughout the years. So, you know, it was typically English. But then I think she found Italian easier by the time she lived in Italy for a while, and then when she was in France, French really became her first language. So she did not really relate that closely to her Greek roots. She didn’t even speak Greek well until she had been living in Atlas for a while. So I don’t think Evangelion George even spoke Greek that much to her and Jackie when they were growing up in their early years. But Onassis really admired mariekes. He loved hearing about how she had, you know, walked for miles to get cabbage leaves and tomatoes for her colleagues in wartime. He himself was a very, very tenacious, strong man. He had freed his father from a Turkish prison. I think that the year, I think, yeah, 1923 the Henri cows, was born before she was born, Onassis was a 16 year old man, uh, bribing a Turkish official so he could sneak into the prison where his father was imprisoned because Turkey had captured Smyrna, which is where Onassis was born. Smyrna is now is near in Turkey, but back then, I presume it belonged to Paris or Cyprus. Sorry, my history is not great, but anyway, his father was in Turkish prison. And he snuck him out. He freed his sisters. I don’t remember the political details, but he was a very tenacious, strong man. Um, they didn’t marry because she, first of all, was married. This isn’t really mentioned enough. She was married now in March 1966 she went to the Greek Embassy in Paris because Greece had passed a law invalidating all marriages of Greek citizens from 1945 onwards, and that would make her a single woman, According to Greek law, but if she wanted to return to Italy to perform or even for a rehearsal or for a meeting with a friend, yep, so let’s say if she’d married Onassis, she would still be charged with bigamy in Italy. So she could have married Onassis and risk and never, never turned to Italy again. That would have been very difficult, considering most of her career had taken place there. And even though she was in having a vocal decline, she was come to Italy quite frequently. Her dressmaker, Biki, lived in Italy. A lot of her friends lived in Italy. And I, and I presume she wanted and she would perform there again, actually in her concert tour, but actually only in a pub, in private little performance, because she was so scared of the Italian press. Um, but she also, she did consider marrying him. They do consider marriage, but they would have arguments, and eventually she ended up saying, well actually, during the relationship, she told a journalist, once you’re married, the man takes you for granted, and I do not want to be told what to do. My own instincts and conviction, my own instinct and convictions tell me what I should or should not do. These convictions may be right or wrong, but they are mine, and I have the courage to stand up for what I believe. So, yeah, they didn’t marry but I think that’s good. I don’t think they would have been a good married couple.

Dan LeFebvre  1:36:48

Well, it sounds like too I mean, like you were saying, since a lot of it was long distance and they were both focused on their careers, that maybe marriage just didn’t make sense. But they could still have, I mean, if she saw him as a still a good friend, then, you know, that’s what was important to her.

Sophia Lambton  1:37:10

Yeah. I mean, they were lovers for sure, during Yeah, you know, I don’t, obviously, I can’t tell you the first time I slept together, I, I don’t have that information, but I imagine it would have been about the spring of 1960 knowing how slow and and also something that I hope listeners, I hope Khalistan to understand. When menage, he dumped her, she was shocked beyond belief. She had been with him for 12 years. He had been the only really close person a lot. He had defended her when things were tough with her mother, he had defended her before all prepper house managers that were tough, you know, it’s true, but he had actually managed to soil her reputation, willingly or not, as a result of trying to drive up publicity. So the callous ticket sales would be higher prices, so callous would get a higher salary, so he would get his own car, you know. But, um, she saw him as the only person in her life, bringing with the end, close person. She was utterly horrified, and she’s wrote on the same day. She wrote that letter to Augusto goddess. Can she in search for July 1960 wrote to Herbert Weinstock, I think, yeah, who was a music critic and a friend of hers, saying, I have been, I have spent the time licking my wounds, not caused by any third party, meaning, you know, it’s not to do with on assets. I have been heard meaning by my husband. And she would write about that a lot to friends. She told her friends a lot about that. But no, they were eventually, of course, eventually, they were lovers for a time, but she dumped him, and the Jacqueline Kennedy marriage was a business thing for him, which, in return, in turn, to Jacqueline Kennedy, assured protection, obviously, financial resources, privacy, because there was a Christine of those Onassis Island, Scorpios, which she needed. So that was a business deal, basically not, I don’t know if you can call it a business deal, but it was a quid pro quo arrangement that was not founded on love.

Dan LeFebvre  1:39:09

That makes sense. I think there’s a in the movie Onassis says something like, you find yourself not doing anything one day and you get married, or something like that. When he talks about Jackie, which implied to me that it was not not for love the way it seemed to be between Maria and Onassis, like they seemed like they actually cared about each other.

Sophia Lambton  1:39:29

Oh, yeah. No, I will. I will, however, admit that Onassis had considered this marriage to Jack and Kenny for a while, probably, probably as early as during his relationship with Marie cows, but she did help dump him first. Okay, so we don’t know what would have happened if they had stayed together. I doubt he would have married Jack and Kennedy one day if they had been in a relationship. Okay? He knew what he was doing. It was very I guess it was quite arranged, pre arranged. It were premeditated things. So that’s, you know, the movie. Quote sounds like something more random. It wasn’t random. He had to further his interests his stock. I’m not a specialist in narcissist stock. I wanted to know what all of this was from Rick House’s perspective. You know what happened to his stock? I don’t know or care particularly, but I do know that obviously that marriage was a shock to her. She was hurt by it. She didn’t learn about it from the newspapers, or at least that’s not what her hairdresser, Frederic somoli later told a reporter years after her death, he said he was with her when she first heard about it on the radio. I think she may have used the term newspapers more loosely to apply to the media, or she may have heard about the newspapers before the radio, and then just burst into tears hearing it again. I don’t know, but she was the middle of, she was preparing for a photo shoot with her stylist, Frederic simoli, in Paris, when she heard about it, and, yeah, she also obviously devastated, and obviously she was being humiliated publicly because she was, you know, this is she was not living in an Instagram time. Even if she had been, I doubt she had. I doubt she would have been the kind of celebrity to post on Instagram. So, you know, Ari and I partiston, I parted ways yesterday. This is not who Mary was. So people did not know that she had dumped him, except for her friends. In fact, actually written. Burton wrote it in his diary, and his diaries have been published, and other friends knew, but the public did not know. So of course, the headline was, and unfortunately, the headline still is on NASA’s dumps callous for Jap and kemby, which was not true.

Dan LeFebvre  1:41:35

It sounds like going back to some of the media and the way they portrayed her, with her performances and her health and things like that, they were going they, I think you said it best, not clickbait back then, but same sort of, you know, titles and things like that to try to gain readership and stuff like that. And unfortunately, it seems like that was not in favor of the truth for what actually happened.

Sophia Lambton  1:41:59

I also wanted to mention I wasn’t able to find out. I’m not sure if anyone actually knows, sure if she did visit him on his deathbed. The hospital in this movie is so weird, because I know what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be the American Hospital in Noyes in Paris. And the hospital, as portrayed in this movie, it looks like some weird, fancy parking lot. I don’t know anything is very empty.

Dan LeFebvre  1:42:26

It does look like a parking garage.

Sophia Lambton  1:42:30

Yeah, bizarre. But anyway, I don’t know if they spoke to each other. When he was on his best deathbed. It was a huge risk for her to appear there, given that Jack and Kennedy was often there, the press were often there. I know she received reports about his condition from Vassar javezzi, who was a pianist with whom she was working at the time, on and off, and apparently ferocha, the butler. He didn’t remember having, I mean, I, I didn’t get to interview ferocho, because Fabio jedvozonia. He was a collective callous items who was on, who was in contact with filcher told me Firoz would not speak to anybody. Now, since then, firocha has actually published his own Little Book of Memories, but it’s very specific to his own relationship with callous. It’s not a biography of callous. It’s more this. These are things you would say to me, and you know, stuff like that. I don’t know if Fabio told me from ferocio that ferocio never mentioned driving her to the hospital to see on us. He was also her driver, her chauffeur. So I don’t know if she went that CNS. I do know that the last time they spoke, at least according to what she told stevios, Carlo topolos was quite a warm occasion. There was no bitterness there. Well, if we

Dan LeFebvre  1:43:45

go back to the movie, I found it interesting that the movie’s version of Maria Callas never listened to her own records. She says something about how it’s the records are too perfect. A song should never be perfect. It should be performed in that moment on stage. But then in the movie, during her final week, during the course of the movie, we see her listening to her own records, and even having her housemate Bruno recording her practicing so she can compare her voice to her earlier recordings. Is it true that Maria didn’t like to listen to her own recordings and then started to listening to them near the end of her life? That’s

Sophia Lambton  1:44:21

pretty much true, but not for the reasons the movie alleges. So first of all, Marie Carlos would never have found her recordings perfect ever. One of my favorite recordings of hers is manually score from september 1957 and she denied the release of it. She forbade the release of it because she thought it was so it was only released in 1959 um, whenever she had herself, she was she was always picking up on things she could have done better. There’s a really loving interview of hers with David Frost on the David Frost show on CBS from 1970 in which he plays her. I think it’s custom diva. It’s definitely from normo. It’s probably the custom diva um. From her first non recording from 1954 he asked, Well, did you sense mistakes? And that? She says, No, but it could have been better. That was always the case. But when she was at the peak of her career, I don’t think she particularly listened to recordings, but I will say she developed kind of an obsessive need to listen to them. When she started to lose her voice, or not started, but later on, by 1967 she was listening to recordings, definitely, maybe not six seven, but Peter Andre, who was who worked for Umi, remembering being, remembered being at her flat, at her apartment in early 1968 and she would play her recordings in front of people trying to figure out what was there, what had been lost. She especially was obsessed in her later years with her earlier recordings, trying to get back her early, more bestial, more out of control voice. But she was terribly self loathing. She said, in every artist, there’s a critic, there are always critics and creators. There’s the one who performs the instrument, the reflexes, and then there’s the other person in you who says, Well, that wasn’t good. That could have been better. So she taught herself to pieces, listening to recording. She would never have said anything was perfect, but yeah, she was listening to them, trying to get back something, trying to understand what she had been doing and what had gone

Dan LeFebvre  1:46:28

makes sense. Makes sense. Well, when we started our chat today, I mentioned the opening scene in the movie is also how it ends. So we’ll circle back to that. Now, as we start to wrap up our discussion and then the final scenes, we see Maria singing so loudly in her apartment that thanks to an open window, people are stopping in the streets to hear it then seems to sap the last ounce of energy that she has. Bruna and fruci went to go get groceries and take the dogs for the walk as well. They come back find her on the floor, even though it’s I’m assuming it’s not historically accurate, because that’s just not the way things happen in the real world. But I thought the movie’s ending was beautifully done. It had me in tears watching it, especially when the dogs come in, they start crying as they see her lying motionless on the floor. But how well did the movie do depicting the way that Maria Callas died?

Sophia Lambton  1:47:15

Well, obviously the moment about Maria Callas singing Republic, you know, the public coming that obviously didn’t happen. Rick House wouldn’t have sung like I mean, sometimes she did sing so loudly, practicing in her flat, the people or in a hotel room, for instance, that the neighbors heard. But not, not at that point when her voice was in tatters. She actually, by that point, she felt her voice was so bad she would, for instance, she would tell ferocho to leave the room when she practiced, all the doors would be closed and ferocious. Would remember that at one point she came out and saw him, said, What are you doing here? Because he wasn’t supposed to be there, you know, near the door, listening, kind of eavesdropping on her singing. She probably, you know, as I mentioned before, bro and chirocha was there when she died. It was quite a simple day. I don’t think. No, she didn’t have, she didn’t have occasion to sing, because she woke up at about 1pm um, prepared on some coffee and eggs. She went to go to go to the bathroom to get dressed. She had a sudden headache. I mentioned earlier she had been suffering from bad pain on her left side. A doctor had said it was flu and rheumatism, but she started having a heart attack. BRUNO offered her spoonfuls of coffee, while Firoz tried to call one of her doctors. Eventually, Fi called an ambulance. I’m not sure why he didn’t call an ambulance begin with, to be honest, but he was trying to reach one of her doctors, and and and she, and she died at about 2:15pm Paris time. Her poodles. She did have poodles. They were Jeddah and pixie. Pixie was smaller than her representation in this movie. Pixie was the white one. Jenna was the black one. I don’t know if they held when she died. They loved her very much. She tried to teach them to sing. There’s a recording of her trying to teach them to sing. And there, there’s a recording of them yapping, and she’s trying to get them to Yap melodically.

Dan LeFebvre  1:49:19

I’ve had dogs. I haven’t had poodles, but it would be a feat to try to get them to sing melodically.

Sophia Lambton  1:49:28

Yeah.

Dan LeFebvre  1:49:31

Something that Maria does mention throughout the movie is how she’s writing her autobiography, although we never see it published in the movie. There’s a line of dialog from her sister near the end, where she tells Maria not to write anything about her life, but if you do, be kind to yourself. And the impression I got from the movie was that she’s mostly hallucinating her life flashing before her eyes before the end. But did Maria Callas actually end up writing an autobiography?

Sophia Lambton  1:49:58

No, Maria clouds didn’t write an auto. Biography, but she was always interested in the idea of trying to set the record straight. The first time she did anything akin to that was when she she wrote a series of articles that were kind of her memoirs. So they were known as her memoirs for Oji magazine in Italy, using a ghost writer, Anita pensoti. So, so she kind of dictated to Anita pensoti That would have been in December 57 No, wait. No, no, December, 56 No, published in January 57 in six installments in orgy magazine in Italy. But she was considering an autobiography, as that is March 1960 when she wrote to her friend herb and Weinstock, the music critic. One day, rather soon, I will decide to write my book biography, but I need someone to make some research in Greece, of pictures, declarations, true in brackets and information that my memory can fail. You know how I’m precise in everything? At least I try my best to be later on. Should pick that up again. That the idea of a biography, an autobiography. But she was so funny. She said, I can’t talk about myself that would be lacking in modesty. So she started writing to her friends and colleagues. She wrote to the daughter of conductor Victor De Sabata, Eliana, who had been her friend in Milan, saying, Can you provide me some memories, because I don’t remember or something. And and wrote to dole Soria, who had worked she had founded Angel records together with her husband Dario. Maria would say there have been so many lies she told. In October 1971 she told Joan Crawford, who was kind of a cattle friend of hers, not not a close friend, but they were on Franny chance. She told Joan Crawford she was working on a biography. And she actually had the interest of an editor at Simon and Schuster in in New York, Peter schwed. And she continued writing. You know, she actually wrote to one of her old maids, meaning one of her former maids, not an old maid, but one of her former maids, Matilda sangioli, asking her again, can you supply some memories? Because I can’t talk about myself, I would be lacking in modesty. So there were there were discussions. She was always, you know, she wore her heart on her sleeve, and her letters are very expressive. They’re very expressive and they’re very open. So she would put for instance, I hope this letter makes sense because I was distracted listening to Wagner’s music on the turntable, and in another letter, in a letter to Irving colon and another music critic, she writes, PS, I hope this letter makes sense because I was interrupted 11 times whilst writing it, so she she really wore her heart on her sleeve. I I really hope that this this episode, and for those who are interested, my book dispels the idea that she was so mysterious, because actually, she really wasn’t mysterious. There have been many performing artists who are mysterious, who continue to be mysterious. Well, cast wasn’t particularly secretive, and she didn’t write hell to biography. She wasn’t a big writer. I don’t think she would have managed writing held a book. She would have found him boring. You know, talking about herself, she actually said in an interview, I don’t like talking about myself, I found me boring. I find me boring. So that wasn’t going to happen, but she did entertain the idea that

Dan LeFebvre  1:53:02

leads right into my final question for you, because you have a biography about Maria Callas in print, a centennial biography. I’ll make sure to add a link in the show notes for everyone to get their own copy right now to learn more about the RE real Maria Callas. But before I let you go, can you share one of your favorite stories that might surprise someone who has only seen the movie.

Sophia Lambton  1:53:23

Well, the first, first and foremost, what I want to tell someone who’s only seen the movie is that above and beyond all other false characterizations of Mary callous, above and beyond all other myths, I think what would have really gutted her was the idea that she could have been rude to a fan. She was never rude to a fan. I mean, all of the colleagues that were not, maybe not all, but the vast majority of people who worked with her talked about how generous and friendly she was. She was such a team player. I mean, she, she sent a message upon him. Kiku mufonio for a Royal Opera House audition. You know, she wrote to the opera house asking for an audition for her. She, when she was at Judah giving master classes, she got the Secretary, Lona Levant, basically she wrote, she sent a singer CB to Larry Kelly, who was a general manager of Dallas civic opera, even though the singer, Mario full score, was 13, nine years old. So you’d think the 39 year old could have done himself, but no, she’s doing it for him. But her public were like has her children, she would never have been rooted them, and she was in touch with her fans. At one point, a fan Dolores rivelino, who’d later become a chef, sneaked in, sneaked into her dressing room, as in kind of illicitly, and Maria offered her a swig from a big bottle of orange age she had been drinking. So she received fans in her dressing room at 3am and another example of how loving she was to her fans was during what was basically what I call the La Scala Cold War, which is when her husband, manegini kept I think it was his awkward, misguided way of getting a higher fee for his wife for her performances. He had spoken ill of the General Manager of La Scala, Antonio giangelli, to the press and giringhe never realized how much of this was coming from manegini and not from callus. So he was trying to get Marie callous to tell him her available dates for the fall. Look following seat in 1957 to 958, Oh, no. Sorry. No wait. No, no, sorry. 1958 to 959, and she would she would give him the dates, and he would say, but I can’t make decisions until I have your dates. And she would say, but here are my dates. And you’ll say, but I can’t make decisions I have this. It is such a silly exchange because it was dramatized in the press as this big few, but when you read the messages, it’s ridiculous. So was playing, or whether he was having some periodic illiteracy going on or something. But it ended badly, because eventually Marie Keller said, I cannot sustain this in genuine relationship, and she left La Scala, meaning she said, I’m no longer going to perform at La Scala. But before that, she was singing in Anna Bolena in april 1958 at La Scala. A month before she left the theater, things were really tense with giringelli. He would eventually, I don’t think it was this performance, but later on, oh, no, wait, I’m just trying to figure this out. No, no. Sorry. We’re not in April 58 we’re in May 58 she’s doing Pirata, her last performance at La Scala. For a long time, she’d return later on in polyuto. That would be in December 1960 but for now, she’s doing il Terada, Atlas column and gongue. It was so piss off at her. He had the big iron curtain, not just the red velvet curtain, but the Iron Curtain. Stage curtain fall down quite early after the performance, so she couldn’t get an ovation. She, you know, the audience couldn’t continue applauding. That was a signal, everybody must go home. And the fire marshal came out and said, you know, okay, clear the stage. Performance is over. And when Rhea came outside, there were all these fans who were huddled to say goodbye, and police officers, police officers, or I don’t know, security girls were there to restrain them. And she said, Leave them alone. These people are my friends. They are doing no harm, because that was her relationship with her public she had been banished from her dressing room. Usually, she would receive them in her dressing room, and sometimes stay up as late as 3am in the dressing room, signing autographs. But she had been kind of the feud had happened. She had left La Scala so during Kelly had ended the performance earlier, meaning they hadn’t given time for innovation or fan engagement, and she stood outside with them and stopped them from being banished by the strange guards who’ve been recruited to stand there.

Dan LeFebvre  1:57:35

Wow, yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s a very different, very Maria Callas than we see in the movie. So I really hope that everybody listening to this will pick up a copy of your book to learn more about the real Maria Callas. Thank you again. So much for your time, Sophia.

Sophia Lambton  1:57:50

Thank you so much, Dan.

Dan LeFebvre  03:18

Before we dig into some of the details of the movie, one thing I like to do is to take a step back and look at the movie from an overall perspective. So if you were to give Disney’s Miracle a letter grade for how accurately it captured the essence of the true story, what would it get?

Lou Vairo  03:34

1. When I saw it, and I waited until a few weeks ago to even see the movie. I never wanted to watch it because as I lived it. But I remember Patti Brooks, Herb’s wife, telling me it was excellent portrayal. And several of the players really liked the movie. And people that were there and I worked with their all saw it, and they thought it was very accurate and and where it was. I had to agree with them all now.

Dan LeFebvre  04:04

At the very beginning of the movie, it sets up the story. We see Kurt Russell’s version of Herb Brooks being chosen to coach Team USA in the 1980 Olympics. What really stood out to me about this in the movie was the timeline, because we see coach Brooks getting the job about eight months before the Olympics are to start, and it doesn’t really seem like a lot of time to recruit players. Recruit players, build a team expected to compete on an international level. So as I was watching that part of the movie, on one hand, we know movies tend to build extra drama and tension a lot of times, and on the other hand, it’s not like the Olympics really sneak up on anyone less than, you know, eight months or a year beforehand. So I couldn’t help but think that maybe this was an example of the movie trying to build up drama by making it seem like the 1980s US Olympic team was just assembled in eight months. How accurate is the movie’s portrayal of building the US hockey team just eight months before the 1980 Olympics started?

Lou Vairo  04:57

It was, it was accurate. You know, we haven’t we. They call the National Sports Festival, which the Olympic committee put together. So we brought in 80 players in July of 79 Colorado Springs, and we had four teams. And we’re able to, of course, it’s summer time, but we were able to fairly evaluate the players. And also an interesting thing was that it’s not like it was years ago when guys weren’t in any kind of shape in the summer. Kids today skate year round. They go to gyms. They go to different programs. So, you know, they’re pretty well committed to hockey by the age of 1718, they finally figured that’s the sport they want to concentrate on. So they’re year round, in pretty good shape. It was a great sports festival. It was at the Air Force Academy, with which is fantastic, and it was very helpful in the election process. Plus curd was a very active coach, and coached in the WCA, the Minnesota golfers. They were national champions, and he knows all the players. He knew most of the players from the different teams, so it was okay. Worked out, okay, the timeframe,

Dan LeFebvre  06:29

okay, yeah, we see that some in the movie. We see them in Colorado Springs, a little bit before the Olympics, a few months before, and now you were involved in scouting for the team, which we don’t really see a lot in the movie. According to the movie, it almost seems like Coach Brooks was the one to decide who made it onto the team. So as I was watching that, I again got the impression that the movie was maybe oversimplifying the process. Can you fill in some more context around your involvement in helping the 80 Olympic team come together?

Lou Vairo  06:57

Yes, her did make all the final decisions which he should make, but he has to answer it. If it’s a failure or a success, you’ve got that answers. He was very he wanted a skating team. He knew the ice surface would be larger. He wanted a good skating, technically sound hockey team. My role didn’t well. I got involved. I was friends with her because I coached junior hockey in Minnesota and brought a different style of hockey to the what’s now the USHL, and it was called the Midwest Junior League, and we were national champions, and we had a lot of college coaches, followers, the players watch us play, including her. So I got to know all these guys, and he got to know me, and he liked what we did at that time in Austin, Minnesota. He really liked it. And he come to practice sessions. He’d invite my team up on Monday nights. We’d go sometimes during the season, play against this JV Williams Arena in Minnesota on the, you know, on the college ground. And so I got to know him real well. He got to know me. I never heard of the guy, and he’d never heard of me. Why? Why would he before I came to Minnesota, and I only came here because of an old player where mine recommended me for the job, and lo and behold, they gave it to me. I didn’t like pursue. It was all accidental, really. But anyway, but her would expose and consult with his people. Great Thatcher. Greg was a great assistant coach, great communicator, perfect go between for herb and the players. Herb was a disciplinarian, demanding and tough, but fair and honest. Good, good coach, excellent coach, and my role came about. I was coaching the under 20 junior national team in 79 and December 79 our games were in Sweden. Both think they were in Sweden. Was it 79 or 80? I can’t even remember, but on the way overseas, Herb asked me if I would stop in Lake Placid. There was a four nation tournament, the beat teams, national beat Team of Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia was one country then, and Sweden. And my boss said that’d be fine, do it. So I did it. And I was in Lake Placid. First period. I was watching between seed Sweden and the USA. And Sweden was doing something that seemed to dis in their own end coming out that was disruptive to our players, and unusual they were sending a week. Side, Winger out high when we had the puck in their own end, and it caused the defenseman on that side to go back, and he cut across the ice, and the entity got nervous, he went back. And what Sweden did was they created a man of damage in their own end, four against three. And they always had an open man. They took theirs to and walk out of the zone. Killed off for check. And I noticed that, and I mentioned that to Bob Fleming, who was chairman of the Olympic team. He’s basically the guy that selected bird to coach it. And Bob was sitting a couple of seats away from me, and I was writing that down on a brief diagram I had with me. And he said, What do you write? Then I explained it, and he said, Can I have that? I said, Yeah, they’ll get me period entity and her came out from the dressing room where the benches were, and he said, Lou, come on down a minute. So I did. We said, explain to me what he saw. And I told him. He said, Okay, good, very good. And they made an adjustment. I suggested something. He liked a suggestion. Usually they knew it anyway, and it’s just reaffirmed. In fact, when you’re sitting above and looking down, you see a lot, not sometimes all the time, you can see more than the coach on the bench out of you making line changes. You’re walking back and forth. You can’t always be the entire surface of the rink, but as a eye in the sky, you can it’s a very good way to scout. So based on that, from that, he kept in touch with me during the season, when they would play exhibition games, I’d get called every once in a while at home, and he would ask me if I been following the team? I said yes. And then when I got back from the World Junior he asked me if anybody, have I seen, anybody that I thought could help the team? And I told him, yeah, I there’s a few players. I gave you some names, but he had made a commitment when they picked the 26 players in Colorado Springs, that he would honor it, that the team of 20 would come from that, and the players held them accountable. He wanted to make change, and I supported him on that. But the players, led by ruzione, did the right thing, and they said, No, that’s not the deal we put up with you for six months. We’re gonna you know we can win a medal. We can win the gold medal. Leave us alone. Just leave us together. He called me, told me, the next thing that happened in a meeting, I believe in Dallas, who were playing the Dallas team in the Central Hockey League doesn’t exist anymore, the central League for the Goodland. And anyway, I said, Well, that’s perfect. He hadn’t to be right. He says, Yeah, I know they are. And I said, not only are they right, They’ve now taken responsibility and accountability for their upcoming performance. That’s that’s great, and, and we, he honored that, and it was great, and it did work. So anyway, from all of those interactions, he said, would you, are you coming to the Olympics? I said, I am. I’m going to help. You know, I’m, I’m going to help with all the, all the things that have to be done at the Olympics. I’m going to be coming as an employee of USA Hockey. There were only four of us at time, and we were all there. So he came up with the idea, what if you sit upstairs and and we use a walkie talkie from the band to the bench to Craig, Patrick, and anything you say to Greg, and he can relate to me, and also you. I’m going to want you to come down after each period and meet with you every morning in the dressing room and go over the different teams and who the next team is we play, etc. And he said, our first game is against Sweden. So I thought about that. When he said that, I went to my boss, Hal Trumbull. I said, How have you selected a team host of Sweden when they come over before the Olympic games start, and they travel and play exhibition games. He said, No, not yet, but I’m working on that right now. Why did I told him? I said, I should be the team host. I can meet them at the airport, take them to the different venues, and watch all their practices. Gaines who get a guilt for the team. I know the coach, Tommy sandling, very well, and I loaded Peter, pokie Lindstrom, and Hal said, Very good. That’s excellent, a good idea. And I called her and told him. He said, perfect, do it. And I think that’s what I did. So there’s a great team, the Swedish team. I was with them for three weeks. I never saw them miss a pass, not in practical games. They were unbelievable. They might have been the most skilled, ethnically skilled team, better than anybody in all the basic fundamental, skating, passing, receiving, combination play. They were good. And they had great young players. They had deli Lindberg and gold. They had Max Maslin, they had Thomas Erickson, Thomas Johnson, many others. I mean, that was a that was a great team, and I think they won the brunsmetal, but we had to be pretty damn good. So anyway, that’s how that all came about, and it worked. You know, I don’t know how much I contributed, but I did my best. I think I did more to contribute. It helped me. I mean, these are good hockey men, Herb and Greg, Patrick. They know what this thing is, because it does help when you have another set of eyes. It just gives you more confidence into what you think you’re seeing. But the big thing is, you know about it.

Lou Vairo  16:33

We had every area covered. He didn’t know if it was legal or not, and Bob Fleming had gotten permission from some of those, some agency, I don’t know what they call it, that’s AA or something, that we could do that, but I don’t know if we had permission, or we even asked the International Ice Hockey Federation or Olympic Committee if you’re allowed to do it or not. Just did it. And so I think it was we just wanted to keep that quiet. I guess. I don’t know for sure. I don’t see anything legal or wrong with it, but who knows, and that’s really why. And then, besides that, it wasn’t me, it was that great team and in the in the coaching staff, and I feel bad sometimes that the goalie coach, Juarez strelo, never gets mentioned. He was outstanding, just outstanding with Jimmy Craig and janicek, and he was one of the great goalie coaches I’ve ever met anywhere in the world. And a good guy, funny guy, terrific man, and hen appreciated him, but to have, excuse me, worm was more in the background. But that’s how that went down. That’s how that all happened. And it was good, because after the first period, I came downstairs. I sat in a little box upstairs. Mondale came the Vice President to some games, and I walked into my box, and there was the Vice President, Mondale and Secret Service agents, and there was guys with guards rifles laying on the beams above us in this in case, in the Spania. Can you imagine that? And here I am sitting there with a walkie talkie watching the game. He was weird, and he was a real nice guy, the Vice President, very nice man. He I introduced myself. He asked me what I was doing. I told him, he introduced I knew who he was, introduced himself and all that it was. He was a pleasant guy, and from Minnesota, of course, he was a big arty fan, and that’s how that went down. I had one of the best views of that whole Olympics, and I will tell you this behind the scenes Stoke, I felt my best contribution was just being heard spread was after the first period of the Swedish game. One, one he was tasting downstairs. There was a outside the dressing room. There was a exit, and nobody kind of staircase, nobody used. And it was big glass windows overlooking the speed skating oval. And I would meet him in that little area. They had just the two of us. Nobody’s bothering us. Nobody can hear us. He’d lean back against the wall. He had his pencil and pad, and they take lift one foot and put it against the wall and stand there. And I’d stand in front. He would ask me, what’d you say? What do you think? Like that? But he was pacing this guy, and I he was very nervous. I said, What’s the matter? Oh, that Efraim Johansson meeting Tenny was his GM. They didn’t get along. Kenny was a great guy, and he loved her and but they were both alpha guys, and they would, they argue with each other about everything, and he said that schedule, we’re finished. We can’t play with this team. We’re exhausted. I say Easy. Easy. Calm down. You play in the best skating team in the tournament, the best technical team in the tournament. These guys are good. I told you, I spent three weeks with them. They’re good, but they’re beatable. We skating with them in the spirit. Well, we just got to go up a notch, and we’re well prepared. We’re playing good. We’re playing really well. He said, You think so? I said, Yes. And I said, Look her, let me be very blunt with you. I’m glad I did this, by the way. I said we got a chance to win a medal. I wasn’t sure coming in, I’m not talking gold medal. I’m just saying we get a chance to win a medal. We, we need to win this game. We this game is winnable, right, pal, and you’ve done a great job with this team. These kids are good, but we have a young team, and the Swedish team is far more seasoned that a lot of these guys are playing a lot of World Champions ships and international events, but you’ve done a great job. You’re a great coach. And stop worrying about Kenny, and he’s my friend. Remember that? So be careful what you say. Stop worrying about you’re a great coach, and you’ve done a great job. You can’t do more than you’ve done. Just believe in the team. They believe in you. I believe in you. And he looked at me like, stop general and let us forget look. And he said, You really mean it? I said, 100% now let’s go get them. And luckily we we got some breaks in the last minute. The Swedes could have easily created off the boards and out. We lose that game, but we end up with a great goal by Baker and Todd, which was a key guy and all that. And we did the tie. And after that, it was fantastic, the confidence level. And, you know, at the beginning, there were that many spectators. There wasn’t even a full house in a search game. You know, people didn’t believe in us, and a lot of the spectators were from foreign countries, like I was, I knew the Soviet team was in trouble, because I was downstairs right by the dressing room every day, and I could see the goings and comings, and I knew their Guys. Boris mojaro, the president of the Federation of your zoomed out blood. Second coach brought a new museum out. I knew all these guy, laundry, store, voice, tough, the General Secretary and I just either were nervous, because whenever that bus would pull in a practice or games, if the 500 people shouting, waving flags of humbling Czechoslovakia, Poland, Eastern European countries, Russians would be the Soviets, and they’d be shouting at the players as they got off, terrible words in some Russian language. They all studied Russian in school, and the Russians were not comfortable. They were never comfortable. They felt not bad, but very nervous. But why are these Americans treating us this way? Plus of us understand, I guess, and all that. It wasn’t good. It was for them. They were not a they were not a confident bunch that they normally are. I could see it, and that’s never been recorded, but that’s the truth. And there were a lot of the fans came to cheer against them, not cheer for anybody in particular. But then, when our thieves started winning, they were cheering for us, of course. And even if you walk down Main Street in lane classic, I saw Soul Man, I can tell by the way they dress their faces that I hear their language. I know where they were from, and that was a big thing in that tournament, and it affected the Soviet team, for sure. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  24:50

I want to ask about the Soviet team, because in the movie, it seems like everything’s from the perspective of Team USA, but we see bits and pieces here. There to learn that the Soviets have been dominant for like, 15 years. I think there’s even a bit of dialog in there that talks about how some of the players on the Soviet team even played together in 15 years. And that just seems like such a stark contrast to the way the movie sets up Team USA, where, you know, they pretty much just started playing together for the past few months. And they’re not professionals at all that come from colleges and such, and so it just seems like there’s this huge contrast that the movie is setting up between the Soviet team and the US team. Is that pretty accurate?

Lou Vairo  25:32

Yeah, my feeling is this, and I I’ve been a student of their hockey there. My main mentor teacher. Was a great Soviet coach. Anatoly Tarasov, great friend of mine that’s still very close to his entire family that’s left, and so I knew their hockey inside and out. In my lifetime, I’ve been to starting with the Soviet Union now Russia 25 times, and I deal every day, basically, even now, with Russian Russian guys, coaches, players. I talked to some of my best friends. I just wrote a book, and I didn’t write it to author. Wrote it, but I gave him the information and dedicating the book to my friend Yuri kamanos, who died a couple of years ago. He was great friend of mine. He played for the Central Army team and played the terrorist out and played with some of those guys. But anyway, it was a great team. It might have been the strongest Soviet team ever put together, you can make that argument, but they weren’t comfortable. That’s what I noticed. They just weren’t comfortable. And that can have an effect on human nature. You know, at our gene, one of the things I don’t like, the main miracle. I don’t like it at all. It was a great, cocky team. Those players were outstanding. They were in great shape, as good a shape as any of the Soviets who were in great shape and and we had two coaches, three with with the goalie coach, stralo, they’re as good as anybody in the world coaching hockey. They were terrific coaches, and our players were wonderful. If you look at the history of hockey in America, the sentiment, are you kidding me? Mark Johnson, he is a great hockey player. Mark paddlewood was a great hockey player. Neil Broughton called me my favorite old time player, great hockey player. Then you had Wells who had a specific job and heard used him perfectly as a defensive spinnerman. He was terrific guy. And then moving Dave Christian back to defense a month before the Olympic Games, was brilliant, and I credit Gordon Jimmy Christensen. There was a nickname he suggested to her to put David back on defense. He said, he said he’s a he’s a son of man. He said he’s anything. He’s a winger, defenseman. He can even play golf. Just trust him, put him on defense. He’ll get the bug out of his own. He can work it because he can stay Yeah, it ran Baker o’ Callahan and soder and Morrill. This was a wonderful team, and Jim Craig was an outstanding goalie, and he probably played the best 20 days or 18 days, whatever the tournament took of his life. I don’t think he ever played better before or since, and it’s a shame that either the outstanding goalie, but he really rose to the occasion. So it wasn’t a miracle to me. It was doable, but I had to play him 10 times. They probably win six, seven of the games the Soviets, but our team that day against them was great, and that’s all we had to beat. Break that one day against them. You only plays them once,

Dan LeFebvre  29:33

yeah. Well, I want to ask about that too, because in the movie we see before the Olympics, like I think it’s three days in the movie, we see the Soviet team playing Team USA as kind of a warm up game between them. So it doesn’t really count, but according to the movie, the Soviet Union comes away with a like a 10, three blowout victory against Team USA, and it really starts to add to the tension and drama in the movie. At least of you know, are we doing the right. And kind of questioning everything up to that point. Can you share what the atmosphere was like around Team USA when they lost that

Lou Vairo  30:07

that night or that game in Madison Square Garden? I was doubting advanced scouting, and I had gone to Montreal. I drove up to Montreal, and I watched two games up there, Czechoslovakia, because that was our second game after Sweden. The checks played. I can’t remember who, maybe Canada. I’m not sure. Then there was another game I watched. So I had gotten all my notes done, and there were no cell phones in those days, and I was driving back to Lake Placid from from Montreal. It’s only an hour’s drive, and that’s where I was going to check in at Lake Placid and be there for the Olympic Games. But I had no way of knowing what we did in New York against the Soviets in the exhibition game, and the next day, I was able to reach herb in New York. And then talk to him in his hotel, and he said it was, it was something Luke. I said, What was the score? And he told me, I think it was 10th grade. I said, Oh, how did we look to me? Did we do anything? Right? He said, Yes. He said, first of all, we were the kids were overwhelmed. I knew we were in trouble, because when the public announcer was introducing the Soviet players, our guys were banging their spit for them on the ice, applauding each player as they got introduced. These have got these are well known players. You know that our kids know of, and they were starstruck. Some intimidation there, yeah, yeah. But he said the thing that I liked was we could have played another game after that, our conditioning has really been good. These kids have worked their ass off for me, and they’re in they were in great shape, but I wasn’t too worried. I at least I knew we could stay with them. And I think the whole thing was overwhelming, you know, just overwhelmed us. The young kid Madison Square Garden, packed house, chanting, applause. You know. So he says, I think if we, when we play him again, we’ll be better. And then we were, and it was, it was interesting, you know, was fun to watch all these teams, but I told them, I had told them. I said, not the Soviet team is jittery. Hey, we, if we can ever get ahead of them, we can really cause them problems. Just they’ll, they’ll argue with each other. They fight with each other. You know, the people say, Oh, they’re so disciplined than that, but they’re human beings, and they argue with bicker, will blame each other and stuff. That’s no different than any other country, but you never see that, because they’re never behind. They’re always weak, you know? They’re always comfortable. And when they told tradyak, I think that was a horrible decision, and he could out blame gizmo for it, your Zopa won’t talk about it. I know him very well. He won’t. He won’t, even to this day, he doesn’t want to talk about us. Every time I see him, he’s still around. He’s 82 he’s great guy, great archetype. I’ll see him and with you know, saying no and greet and all that I say to him, like Placid, and he goes crazy. He makes the best waves without me. Oh, he goes crazy. He’s a real good guy.

Dan LeFebvre  33:56

That’s funny. Well, if we go back to the movies timeline, after the Olympics start, there are a number of games that the movie just shows very quickly before the big game, we see USA versus Sweden. Talked about a little bit about that. That turns out to be a tie game. And then there’s a seven three win over Czechoslovakia, five to one win against Norway, yeah,

Lou Vairo  34:17

but that was the most unbelievable game for me in the whole Olympics. That was a great Czechoslovakian team. Yeah, and the night before the game, I invited the three Czech coaches. They the last of the three just died six months ago. The head coach was Carl boot, and the assistants were Dr Lud Bucha and Stanislav medvesseri, three outstanding players, former national team players and great coaches and great guys, great hockey men. Carol good later on, became president of the Czechoslovakian Ice Hockey Federation before. Of the, you know, the split, and then they was president, I think, of the Czech Federation for a while so, and they, they have like buildings that they rent out different countries. They call it the US House, Swedish House, or the Italian house. Well, I knew some of the people at the Italian house, and they loved me. And I bring them some pens and some little banners USA, and they would feed me, and they bought their old food and chefs from Italy with them. So it was unbelievable. No, you can’t find a restaurant as good anywhere in the inland, outside of Italy, as good as this was, so they told me. I said, Can I ever bring a Chinese? They said, of course, you bring whoever you want. But I bought three Czech coaches because they were all friends of mine, and we had a great dinner and great night. I remember boot coach. I he couldn’t speak English. Taro good, but Bucha never said he could. But with Carl, good, I can converse with him well enough in German. We could speak in Germany to each other well enough. And the other guys, I speak in English because I don’t know a few, maybe a few words, check or Slovak, but not many. And ludie said, I watched your team practice this morning. Uh, it tracks too hard, in my opinion, coming off the game against Sweden, and now the players tomorrow. And I remember Stan Stanislav saying to me, you know, I said, is everything good with your team? He said, No, not exactly. We lost Ivan Linka Henri was the key to our power play, and we just haven’t gotten that resolved the way we’d like it. And we’re, quite frankly, we’re worried about discuss these escaping, you know, what do they call that when they run away from the country? Uh, whatever that term is, defecting. Is

Dan LeFebvre  37:15

that right? Defecting, the

Lou Vairo  37:18

fact, yeah, they’re worried about detecting, because they had a lot of I would see them their own Secret Service people traveling with those teams from the East countries, from the Soviet Union, etc. They had the credentials. And I would see them in the bowels of the arena, always outside the dressing room, watching every move of every every part of the personnel. So they, and I, like the goalie, I think it was crelik, I’m not sure Yuri krillet. He’s okay, but one of the goodest previous Czechoslovakian goalies, like called a Czech even zerilla. And I have to tell you, if I were you going to predict, I would say I would have predicted the checks to win, 535242, something like that. They were really good. I mean, they’re the only team that ever really eat the Soviets. During those the reign of success that the Soviets had, it was always Czechoslovakia to be the team that beat them and in the 72 stupa series between the greatest Canadian NHL players against the greatest Soviet players, which wasn’t really true, because how how Bobby, you are. They weren’t playing because they were injured or in the WHA and they weren’t allowed to play, which was stupid in the 72 series. And playing that 72 Soviet team, which did a great job sure won. It really surprised. Well, I’m not surprised they lost because of two great players, Phyllis Esposito and his brother Tony. I’ll say it now, and I’ve said it forever. It should be a statue in front of any ice rink in Canada, a bronze bachelor, Tony in goal and Phil scoring, those two brothers with Canada on their back and led the will willed them to that victory in 72 and so, you know, Czechoslovakia was a great team, And they were the world champions that year. In 72 they had beat the Soviet team that was played Canada and then the Canadian team on their way home after the 72 Summit Series, they played, and I believe they beat Czechoslovakia of three two in Prague. I. Believe that’s pretty accurate, something like that. So I was done when I saw us play like we did. We were flying, we were flying, and we beat him. We ran them out of the building Seventh Street. Then I knew we could win a short a medal, maybe the big one. And then the games against Romania, West Germany, Norway, I think that’s who we played. They were. They weren’t easy. You know, these countries can put 1520, good players together. They weren’t easy. They were, I mean, we won them all without being too nervous, but they weren’t easy, and then, then Finland, after we beat the Soviets, we had to beat Finland, and they had a goalie. Jorma volnan yom is the hall of fame goalkeeper in the international SRC Federation, Hall of Fame, one of the greats from Finland, the first of many great finish goalies. Yom is still coaches today. He’s probably close to 80 coaches in Italy now, and he helped develop the great finished goalkeeping program that’s produced all these great finish goalies the last 20 years or so. And I gotta tell you a little side story about Yom. I still was still in touch with each other. Yoma, do you remember the plane from Yaris Lovell that was going to St Petersburg at the opening of the KH Hill season of library years ago that took off and crashed and everybody died. He remember

Dan LeFebvre  41:48

that story, I remember, I remember the story, yeah, yeah.

Lou Vairo  41:52

And he was on that flight, Oh, wow. And they just announced. He told me the story, passing your seat belts. And his cell phone rang, and it was his president of the club. He was working for Yaroslavl, teaching goalies, and Mr. Yaakov called him, and he said, Are you in the air? He said, No, we’re getting ready to take off. He said, tell him to stop. And he did. He yelled out, don’t take off. You know, whatever. And what’s going on? It’s Mr. Yaka Levy. I have to get off the plane. We got two Junior goalies just came in. He wants me to work with them, so I’m not going to make the trip. And he got off. But finally got to the rink. The plane, he crashed. Wow. Imagine that. Wow. I

Dan LeFebvre  42:39

I couldn’t, I mean, I couldn’t imagine, I don’t know what my the thought process would be around that that’s, wow,

Lou Vairo  42:47

wasn’t meant to be. God intervened, I guess I don’t know. Yeah, and, and he still alive. Yeah and, and that was such a tragedy. And, boy, that they do a great job in the Aristotle every single home game, they honored them all the parish. It’s beautiful, and they did it. They still do it. It’s very nice, nice way to remember those poor people.

Dan LeFebvre  43:15

Well, you’re talking about the the Soviets, kind of feeling like they were never really behind and in the movie, we see the games from Team USA that you were you were talking about. But on the Soviet side, we don’t really see a lot of their games, but we find out that they basically blew out their competition. I think they they said they won all five of their games. Scored like 51 goals. No, they

Lou Vairo  43:36

murdered Japan. And a few teams had a very tough game against Finland and a very tough game against Canada. Okay, the key out of all this, I have to say the truth. You’re interviewing me. I’m going to tell you the truth. Yeah, no, that’s what we’re here for with I’m just glad we never played Canada for some reason during the pre Olympic trial. I mean, games exhibition schedule Canada was tough for us to beat. Okay, it is something that’s now, I think, overcome, but for a while, very psychological between just like blow boxing checks. Checks seem to always beat the slow box, but now it’s changing, and the checks are playing well, but it’s changing US and Canada. Canada had maybe a subconscious little advantage over the US, not that often. 1960 Olympics, under Coach Jack Riley, we beat Canada. Harry Sidon was claiming might have been captain of the Canadian team. And Canada was a, not an easy team to play against, and they almost beat the Soviets, you know, they gave them all they could handle and and Finland too. So we knew Finland was good, very. Very good, and I knew involved in was great. I told everybody said their goal is good. We gotta, we can’t raise shots. We gotta spoil when we shoot. This guy is good. He’s one of the best in the history of international hockey, one of the better goalies. So anyway, but her made that great each I was standing outside, but the lotto door was opened, and the typical Brooks beach, and very typical, he said, You know what we did the other day against the service, something like that will mean nothing if we don’t win today. This is, this is a game we have to win. What, believe me, you’ll take it to your grades. If we don’t, you’ll take it to your grades. That’s very powerful words, and I couldn’t describe it better. And, and, of course, we won. Mark Johnson was spectacular. Dover told it. These guys were good players.

Dan LeFebvre  46:05

The kind of climax of of the movie at the end is, is that big game we’ve kind of alluded to and talked about a little bit, but in the movie, the way it sets it up is because, because of the the game beforehand at Madison Square, where the US got beat. Now it’s, there’s all this tension here in the movie, of, are they going to be able to beat? This the Soviet team. And throughout the movie shows bits and pieces back and forth. They kind of going back and forth. There’s a lot of action that’s, that’s fun to watch. It doesn’t focus on a lot of specific details. But it’s, a movie, so it’s focused on just showing a lot of the action of the game itself. But then as time starts to tick away in towards the end of the game, the Soviets find themselves in a position that they’re not familiar with, being down four to three in a game. And we start to sense in the movie, something that you had kind of alluded to was the Soviets started to look like they were not very comfortable. Can you share what the experience was like for that game?

Lou Vairo  47:08

They were very uncomfortable and very, very nervous. And when they told all right, I don’t. I thought tradiac was, I always believed traded to be one of the greatest goalies that’s ever played the game. Really, physically hardest work you all got. He was a great goalie, only guy that ever could score. Two guys could score against him without much trouble, Bill Esposito and must love nedimansky used to score against him, but most people have a tough time with Ronnie Iceman. He’s intimidating. He’s so big and agile and quit you think he’s going to kill you. Well, he can go you want to go in and shoot on him. He charges out he said, Hey, I can tell you that I’m not exactly Sonia Henrik once, but anyway, pulling him to me, I think deflated team a little bit and broke their confidence like we depend on him. He’s our man and Mushkin, excellent goalie. People forget one year previous and the Challenge Cup at Madison Square Garden. It was best of three. He was tired of one game each the NHL all starts against the same Soviet team. He could have started moosekin In the game, which shocked everybody. Mooskin Shut him out, I think shit nothing, which is pretty impressive. And mooskin was a good goalie, but what I’m saying is I think it shook the team up, and Michael was the only he was a hard working guy, wonderful captain, a great leader for that team, but he was something else that he’s never gotten the credit he deserves. He’s a natural goal scorer. He can score a goal anywhere he ever played high schooler. He’s a goal scorer. He can bury the biscuit. And he scored a great goal against Moskin, who was a great goalie. Too great goal for the winning goal. How do you not? How do you not Where did the miracle? Where this was a great goal scorer, who scored a great goal? I want to see these kids get credit heard. And Craig Patrick did a great job, and Warren strelo The equipment managed many to try. Mean old team, Dr Nagi, all the guys, great guys, but the truth of the matter is they, they won a miracle team. They played the game of their lives against Soviets, and they played a a wonderful, wonderful Olympic competition. They were great. Just like our 60 team, they were great. We’ve had other teams that played well and great, but no, none of the other teams won the gold medal. These two teams did, and they should be eluded for their excellence.

Dan LeFebvre  50:35

Just a good, good team. Yeah, no, it’s

Lou Vairo  50:39

a great team. I coached a lot of those players, so myself on teams. I know how good they were, yeah, and they had said this, and I’ll say right, Daniel again, I don’t believe any other coach would have won, won the gold medal with that team, but books, he was just the right, perfect coach, perfect timing. I often told him. I said, if you were to coach in in 76 or 84 it wouldn’t be a legend. You’d be like me, a dummy. You wouldn’t have made a legend. I think it matters. Everything has to be right. Just go right for any team to win a gold medal in the Olympics, not just that we did. Everything has to go right. You got to get bounces. You got to be healthy, you got to it just has to work. Guys have to play at the top of their game for two weeks of their life. And this team did it, and I, I salute the coaches. They didn’t, they didn’t get in the way and mess it up and made it better. And Craig Patrick did a great job in his role, uh, supporting her all year long. It was Estrella you can coach Goldies, you know. So that’s my take on it. Anyway,

Dan LeFebvre  52:09

yeah. Well, I wanted to ask about the Soviets when they replaced their goalie, since the movie kind of focuses on the US side of things, not as much from the Soviet side. You mentioned that that kind of seemed to deflate the Soviets. But according to the movie it shows it seems to be like a morale boost for team USA. Was that kind of the point in the game where you felt, wow, we might actually win this thing.

Lou Vairo  52:35

Yeah. But you know what really when Mark Johnson scored at the end of the period, pinker was David’s Christian flipped the puck up in the air and thought side and mark the two defensemen, Billy tervulkin, on the Soviet side, and even trading at they kind of let up, and Mark was right between them, grabbed the puck and leaked out tradiac and scored. To me, that was, that’s what I said. Oh, we could win this. We got a shot. And, yeah, it was, there was tension still, and like, oh God, the last I liked Herb’s comment, the last 10 minutes of the game, he said, with the longest 10 minutes of my life. And I felt the same way. I mean, I just kept looking at the clock. Move, move, move. They put on a rush the course bar, I think, and maybe the post malfev was in there. Petra, a lama. They’re a great team. I I can comfortably say that. I think that might have been in greatest Soviet team I’ve ever seen, at least on paper. But they didn’t have a great tournament, and they still could think what they went to silver, and they they weren’t comfortable. Those people from the Eastern countries upset them. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  54:07

you were talking about that before, where they just they didn’t feel comfortable the whole time. But it’s

Lou Vairo  54:12

and I was outside their dressing room a lot, and I remember when they beat Canada or Finland. I can’t remember which team the game ended, and it was a such game for them. And as they were walking in, something I never saw coaches do before, but it’s, you know, we’re talking different cultures here too. Uh, Soviet culture was not the Canadian or the American culture, but he could not. Was standing outside the dressing room door, and as each player was coming in off the ice at the end of the game, he was greatly relieved. He would kiss each player on the lips. He would listen to do that, you know, part of their culture, men kissed men on. Lips, relatives and friends, you know, and as they came in, he would kiss him, and he would fold their shoulders, and he would say, bolshei, basiba. Great thanks. Many, many, great plants. Each player, they were so relieved they had won that game, though I knew they were bold enough. I felt it all along. I INAF times. I knew their culture, I knew their nervousness, and I kept saying and never in the position to win. Lucky. You know, they’re usually ahead by three four goals going into the third period. I’d like to see how they’re going to react when things are not going good, and that’s what we thought of it. You know, we

Dan LeFebvre  55:52

don’t see a lot from the Soviet side in in the movie, but the movie seems to imply, as I mentioned earlier, that they were kind of blowing out their opponents, but you mentioned that they weren’t necessarily so at the point at which the Soviets were playing the US. Do you think that kind of the the atmosphere of the games had changed overall?

Lou Vairo  56:13

Yeah, oh yeah. We were Oh. The building was now packed. Everybody waved flags. All the front runners showed up. They weren’t there at the beginning. They all showed up and in the streets, all these people. I mean, I had a USA jacket so and I I didn’t live in the Olympic Village. I lived outside of it because I wasn’t an official part of the team, and I’d walk the streets. I knew everybody from these different countries, because working with USA hocking is part of my job. And just walking around, they’d see USA jacket. People would come up to me, hug me, kiss me. Some women brought me flowers, and they would say with their accents, thank you. Thank you. Thank you America. It was so thrilled to see the Russians get beat and and I’d have a chance for the gold medal. It was, it was never talked about, never spoken about. But there’s people. They’re immigrants to our country, and here they were cheering for us against their role, people you know, against people they felt invaded them their country, and tell them hostage. So it was interesting.

Dan LeFebvre  57:36

There was a point in the movie. I don’t remember the specific dialog to it, but it becomes pretty obvious that there’s more than just the game itself. I mean, the movie doesn’t get into politics or anything like that, so we don’t focus on politics either. But there is a point where Kurt Russell’s version of coach Brooks says something like, we’re about to play the greatest team in the world. Can’t we just leave it at that? But it seems pretty obvious that there’s, there’s something else to Soviet Union playing the United States in the Olympics game. They’re going to have external impacts. Did that imply a lot of extra pressure to the team?

Lou Vairo  58:14

No, I’d say no. I think most of them didn’t care. Most of them, most people, young people like that. They just want to live their lives. And these kids were looking to become pros and or move on with their lights to the next stage, whatever that might be. I don’t, I don’t think so. No, I think that scrum probably, yeah, some, it probably excites me more than others, but most, no. And you know, I dealt with the Soviets a lot, and if you’re dealing with bureaucrats and you’re dealing with politicians, it’s never, wasn’t in any realm. But if you deal with the people, it is just the people. They’re no different than we are to be Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Irish, Swedish, and it doesn’t matter Argentinian. It doesn’t matter Canadian. All people basically want to do is live their lives. They want to have a job, decent job, raise their family, go to the beach for two weeks in the summer, have food on their table, follow their favorite sports teams, maybe have a doctor in Russia, in Russia, or some of the European countries outside of a big city, where they have a little garden and a place in the summer, a retreat to go to on weekends, that’s all people want. Really, average person, they don’t get deeply involved in the international politics of everything, and if you follow it. On the news. You know, as well as I do, the way it’s the news have deteriorated now it’s half the newscasts, nor more than half the newscasts are politically slanted, and you don’t even know if you’re getting honest reports from either side of the political spectrum. No, I don’t think politics. I think underneath the circus with Carter saying we’re not going to go to Russia for the Summer Olympics in this in the invasion of Afghanistan, yeah, they bothered. We took the same thing years later, and we got chased out just like, just like Soviet now we gotta, really gotta find, we gotta find politicians that look to create peace, not not not fighting, because General people, in general, are just people that the same everywhere. You just want to live, live their lives well, because

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:05

the movie focuses so much on that game against the Soviets, as you mentioned earlier, it wasn’t like Team USA was done. They had one more game against Finland, but the movie doesn’t really focus on that too much. So can you fill in some more details that we don’t see in the movie about the actual gold medal game for team USA against Finland.

Lou Vairo  1:01:24

Yeah, I can tell you that Herb was very concerned and worried that there’d be a letdown, and that’s why he made that great speech in the room. And I think we had very good leadership from luzioni and pakoda and these guys on the team, some of the team leaders of the team, Jimmy Craig was zoned in focus then, and Mark Johnson, you know, like I told you, history USA Hockey, I would put them in The top six, seven sentiment we ever had in our hockey to this day. You gotta have Johnson Pavlov, and they got the job done against a great goalie, Walton and from Finland and a good Finnish team. So we did great. We did great and and like I told you, we had the right coaches at the right time for the right team, and it was in the right place. You know, we won two gold medals in our history, in the Olympics, and one was in Squaw Valley, California, the other Lake Placid, and the silver and Salt Lake City on the when you play in the other countries, it’s a little tough. And I’ve been probably, I think I’ve been about six Olympics, so I have a seal for it. And we did great. Plus we were nervous. I didn’t want to. I kept saying to myself, let’s not blow it now we, you know, we cut but what I heard her words, you’ll take it forever to your grades. It got me fired up. I remember because normally I would leave in enough time to walk up a bunch of steps and get to my little booth. Anthony said that that was enough for me to hear. I ran up the steps. I was juiced. I was fired up. You know, those were perfect words for him to come up with,

Dan LeFebvre  1:03:37

yeah, and all ready to go and ready to bring it home and actually finish off and get the gold.

Lou Vairo  1:03:43

Well, what a release that was to do that. It was such a release. Oh, my God. It was so great. Really, was I cried?

Dan LeFebvre  1:03:53

Yeah, I could see it really emotional just letting

Lou Vairo  1:03:57

1. How much cry with this interview. A few times I get choked up. Those memories were great to see such joy on the faces of the players and the fan. It was great, and it’s important to this day because I still coach little kids off ice, training 910, year olds, and they all saw a miracle 150 times each, and they all know it. And I they always asked me about is, did this really help me coach Lou whatever? And I tell them, yeah, it’s all true, boys and a few girls, because we have girls now playing. And if you guys ever want to get to that position. You got to work as hard as those kids did, and that’s just as hard as smart. And we’re giving you stuff here to learn, and you got to practice it at home on your own also. And they get all fired up. They love it well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:04:55

then the movie ends after the the 1980 Olympics. But do. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you following up in 1984 Olympics after you know, Herb Brooks was not coaching team USA. That was you were the head coach of us hockey that year. Did you feel any pressure following the as the movie puts it, the miracle team from 1980

Lou Vairo  1:05:17

Yes. Let me tell you a little story that’s interesting. I wasn’t there was no pre ordained coach. I didn’t even want to do it. Nothing like that. What happened was nobody wanted to coach. I gave names. I wasn’t officially on the search committee, but I gave names to the search committees, and I can’t remember exactly. Art Berlin is dead now, but art told me how many five or six coaches they asked, I mean, well known names, Coach team, they all refused, different reasons, legitimate, you know, I can’t leave my college team first a year. I don’t want to do that. What other thing might have been? And Ron De Gregorio, art Berlin and Fayette tutter Was the President of the USA Hockey it was called a house, but I’m a Charity Association of the United States. They said to me, you’ve coached the junior national team. You were with her the Lake Placid. You’ve worked with Bob Johnson. You work with the best and you know, you know the European teams better than anybody we have, and you know, I’ll play a pool. Would you like to coach the team? And I said, No. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t feel I earned it. And, yeah, I was still pretty young. I don’t know, 36 whatever. I said, No, and art is the one who convinced me. He said, Look, never get another chance. You do that. Anybody can coach anywhere, but the coaching Olympic team is special, and we need you. We need you. And Fayette Hutt was a favorite person of mine. He was a funny, little old guy, good guy, smart and everything, but also just a good guy. And he was always so nice to me. He said, Luke coach, Dean. So they interviewed me, and they interviewed Tim Taylor, and in the interview, I said, give it to Timmy, and he needs help. He’s more qualified than I am, and when they interview Timmy, he’s going to give it to Luke.

Dan LeFebvre  1:07:52

I’ll help, of course.

Lou Vairo  1:07:56

Finally, art Birdland wore me down, and I agreed to do it, and I have absolutely zero regrets. I’m really happy I did it. I had a great team, but of course, when I agreed, I had looked at the debt chart and I saw some of the players that we had. We’d have Bobby Carpenter, we’d have, let’s see Erickson, Brian Mullen, uh, Craig Ludwig, Phil Housley, Tom Barrasso, Johnny van beatrick. I was, I can’t remember all the names now, but pretty good plays. They all died. They didn’t want to wait a year and a half, whatever. Well, I don’t blame them? I didn’t blame them at all. They all died. Baracko died. He got kidnapped by the buffalo sabers during our training camp in Alaska. We were playing the Soviet wings, wings. They came up and they stole and slowed back on a private plane of Buffalo and signed them, and that year in one first gold star, I think, looking of the year of Desmond award. He’s 18 years old. He was a high school player and and I wish they would have said something to me. I wouldn’t have stopped them. I couldn’t have anyway, but I wouldn’t have liked Tom. He turned out to be a great goalie. And I had no problem with the goalies we had left. Mason and Baron were great. They were great. Loved them. But, I mean, it could have been different. Who knows if it would have been different? Aaron brought me another one up until five, six years ago. He was the all time leading scorer of the New Jersey double. These guys would have been on our 84 team, except they will sign and again, don’t blame them the least bit. Never told anything against them, but it would have been a little bit of a different team, and a spill was a great team as Joliot LaFontaine, Eddie oldchurch, David. So two of them, hna, Tommy Hirsch, the Fusco brothers. No, I was a great team. Terry Sampson, Gotti bukester, these guys could play. They could play. They could play better than I could coach. I’ll tell you that they could play. And they were very that was the youngest team ever. But I mean, Ally, afraid, I think, and old Chuck, he was guys. I think eight of our players could have played on the junior national team. There was a team, or very young team, and they went on, many of them, to great careers. Injuries caused problems for a few others. But I love that team, and my sadness with that team is we only lost, you know, how many games that we only lost two games in the Olympics? You could lose the Czechoslovakia and Canada, you know, in close games, that’s possible. And that wasn’t republic of this. And the Republic you didn’t play Panama and Guatemala. You know, you played great countries in hockey and out of our country. But those kids were so young. I had three kids in high school, three or four kids still taking high school classes, living with building families, and ice check the homework. You know, that’s the way it was. And of course, the expectations were tremendous, and our record was two wins, two losses, two ties. I could live with that. And the only reason I It upsets me is the world didn’t see what a good team this was. This was a good team. We beat a lot of NHL teams in preseason exhibition games, and you can’t do that. And we beat Soviet teams at exhibition games. You can’t do that if you weren’t good. You know the players weren’t good. Can’t happen.

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:03

Yeah, it makes sense. Great experience.

Lou Vairo  1:12:05

I’m glad I did it. Now I look back and I’m happy I did it,

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:12

yeah, yeah, no, that, I mean, that’s great. It’s funny, you’re didn’t want to do it, and the other guy didn’t want to do it. And it’s almost like a game of hot potato. Like, no, I don’t want it. You take it. But in

Lou Vairo  1:12:23

the end, it sounds like it was great. If you don’t win a gold medal, you’re a fan,

Dan LeFebvre  1:12:27

right? That’s why I was, yeah, I was, that was the impression that I got. It would be like, because you’re following up with a team that won the gold medal, it’s like, well, if what else can you do? There’s nowhere to go. But

Lou Vairo  1:12:39

down. I tell people, it’s the second greatest thing I ever did in my life, that I’m proud of, that I did it, and I’m glad I took the I wasn’t afraid to take the risk. I wanted our hockey to be great in America. That’s why I worked for USA Hockey. I seen it grow from nothing, something great that it is today. I was very proud of it, but yelled, there’s more important things than winning games. You know, I always say I got drafted in 66 to the army two years that’s the greatest achievement, personally, that I ever had, serving my country that I cherish as the most wonderful gift, then the hockey comes second, and of course, your family comes family and God comes before any time. That’s the way I look at life, simple.

Dan LeFebvre  1:13:38

Well, thank you for your service in the military. And thank you for coming on to chat about the movie miracle. I want to shift a little bit before I let you go to talk about your new autobiography, I’ll make sure to add a link to it in the show notes for this if anybody’s listening and wants to get a copy. But can you give listeners a little peek in your new book and maybe share one of your favorite stories from it the

Lou Vairo  1:14:00

most sweat I had was if Mike said, Lou, you gotta, we gotta have testimonials. I don’t even know what he meant. I thought I died. I said, What do you mean the testimonials? He said, call up some people you know, in hockey or players, sex players, and get them to spend that a few sentences about you, meaning me. I said, I can’t do that. I’m afraid to do it with some of God knows what they’ll list. So I, I went to people. I worked with Jay Riley, Jack Riley’s son. We worked together with national teams. Years ago, he sent the nice piece. Then when I you think I only destroyed hockey in America, I coached the national teams of Italy in Holland also. So I destroyed hockey in three countries, mice and so I called, I called, he has a big job. Up in column now with a former national team player. He wrote a nice thing in and and I asked Phil Housley, Soviet player, very close friend of mine, and guy, go back 40 years with Igor Ariana. Phil Esposito Christian, Chelios, just to name a few. Those are pretty big names. These are all Hall of Fame guys. And very nice thing. Jim Craig, the real beautiful things are very touchy to me, and I didn’t know they felt that way. And I was even afraid to ask them, God knows what they’d write, and Pat Lafon Payne wrote the forward for the book. It’s beautifully written. What he wrote, it’s very touching to me, emotional, and you don’t realize it, but you never think of yourself as making making a difference in anybody’s lives, but these guys claim I did, so it’s just humbling, and very humbling. I don’t like to talk about myself like that. So yeah, it’s going to be an interesting book and and I think a fun read if me and I’ll tell you something else. I can’t stand when I hear people say I’ve been misquoted or I’ve then, what’s the other word? It’s about what I shared. Shut up. I’ve never I’ve done a million interviews in my life that I’ve said some things later on, a few times, that I might have regret, I might have regrets for but I’ve never been misquoted. Period, what you say is what you say, and you can’t run away from it. You gotta deal with it. And you if you did something that you regret, then you can apologize. Can’t say I’ve been misquoted. You. Blame it on the reporter. That’s not right at all. So yeah, that’s a few thinking they’re probably gonna erase somebody. But I also I don’t care. I said them, and so I said, I’ll live with it. No, but I will. I’ll tell you one little story. It’s not in the book. I could write a book just on some of the things, little stories from different people. But this is funny. I had an 18 city tour in the United States in 79 that I organized because we didn’t have teams. Weren’t doing dry land training specific for Aki in those days. And the guy who had really thought of it officially was Anatoly Tara Soviet Union, and he coached Central Army team, and he was national team coach and assistant coach, or CO coach with akati chairmanship. So I invited Bolger to come. I had a good relationship with the Soviet Federation, and we worked it out. And Dr ladaslav Gorski, unfortunately, they’re all dead now. Worski was some Bratislava. He was the Slovak, but then it was Czechoslovak, and he did specific or vice training for goalkeepers of all ages. Karasad Did under 20, rather 15 years old and up pros and chernochev under 15, and we went to 18 cities. I had Charlie to check he’s alive. He lives in Greenwood Lake, New York. Charlie was originally from Czechoslovakia, Prague, and immigrated to the US. We met him as Brooklyn. I met him in Brooklyn at the rate, and we became friends, which we still are to stay. He was the interpreter for Gorski and the Russian the Soviets, and called then they sent led, she’s alive. He’s in his 80s, and Moscow, good guy. He was the interpreter so the two Soviet coaches, so we went all around. They did a great job. They didn’t make much money. We only charge $15 a head per coach come to the seminars. They absolutely was sensational, and they sold out everywhere, and it changed the fortunes of our hockey because 1000s of coach, I don’t know, hundreds or 1000s of coaches were, and lots of kids that we use this the examples in the workouts, learned something great and new that could help them. It influenced our hockey daytime was a great move, and we thought we were going to lose 10 grand, which was a lot of money then, and we made 10. Steam grand after I got permission to give those guys each a bonus for the great job they did. And so it was a win, win, win, win. I was the only one that lost. There was exhausted heal and carrying medicine balls and weights and ropes and rubber suspenders and all kinds of things on airlines around the country, and then there was a plane crash in Chicago when we were there, terrorists have refused to fly anymore. He said, Only if you have aerosol out. I said, Our next stop is Detroit. There’s no air flight flights from Chicago to Detroit, so I had a rest the van, and that’s how we did the last part of our trip, with van with me driving. And it worked out great. It worked out it worked out great. It was wonderful. But we’re in Niagara Falls, New York, and what I wanted to do in order to increase income, and also to include Canada, because we wanted to have a good working relationship the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. Dennis McDonald was running it. Great guy. Did a great job. He helped me a lot. When I was starting out. We put him in border like Seattle, Hancock, Michigan, Duluth, Minnesota. Where else? Oh, Niagara Falls, New York, right across the river from Ontario. We were able to get a lot of Canadian coaches to come, which was great, and it made him work well. So well in Niagara Falls, and we had a day off. Was a beautiful June day. I said, guys, let’s go see the falls. So we went to the falls. Everybody was impressed. He said that Assaf, he was a very proud Soviet guy. And I said, you don’t think it’s nice. He said, Yes, it’s it’s very nice, but we have better water Forbes and so Henri, I said, it’s okay. That’s who he is, let him say. And I love it now we go to because I would get along great with them, but we’d argue once in a while. Then we went to the aquarium, which was great. You know, with 1000s and they could, they had an aquarium. They still have it. It’s above ground, and you could go down below. You could see the dolphins underwater, as well as on top. So we started out on top, and tarasa wanted to go down to sea, so we all went down, and we’re watching, and I see him make a comment to the interpreter, and both of them laughed at a laugh, but I walked over, I said, Look, what did Anatoly say? He said, Oh, nothing, not important. And of course, but outside, he told me. He said, uh, Lou, you’ll be insulted. I said, No, I won’t. But what did he say? He said, You American? These Americans amazed me. They have beautiful supermarkets, big buildings we’re seeing as we travel across the country. He said they have more mayonnaise than one supermarket to I can find now in all of Moscow combined. They can do everything. They can even teach fish to fulfill the most difficult tasks. Tell me, why can’t they teach their hockey players to make a three meter pass? And I found it was better going and ironically, very true, it was great.

Lou Vairo  1:24:02

This went on week and day after day, week after week. I mean, it was a the height of the Cold War. He was at one of my grandmother’s house. So all these guys for dinner in Brooklyn, this wonderful grandmother of my old Italian lady from Sicily, and she prepared an incredible meal. She was in her 80s that time. She lived to 103 and these guys so respectful and polite and appreciative to her. They just loved loved it that few years after, and it’s at the height of this Cold War. He’s sitting in a club you know, Alison in Brooklyn, eating spaghetti. And it was wild when I look back at wonderful memories every time I would see him anywhere we were in. The world. The first thing he would always say after greeting me, whoa, babushka, okay, grandmother, okay. And I put my thumbs up. It say yes. And he said whoa, very, very in English, he only knew like five words he’d say, very, very, very good spaghetti. And I told my grandmother, she’d get a big kick out of it and ask me how they were doing the last you know, good. You’re okay little wives. So yeah, that’s about it.

Dan LeFebvre  1:25:35

Thank you again. So much for your time, and I really appreciate it.

Lou Vairo  1:25:39

You’re welcome. You’re a pro. Thank you.

October 8, 1967. Bolivia.

To kick off this week’s events from the movies, we’ll go back to the 1969 film called Che! to find an event that happened 57 years ago on Tuesday this week.

About an hour and 21 minutes into the movie, we’re inside a room with a shirtless man’s body lying on a table. A group of men, some in suits and others in military uniforms, are crowded around. One of them points to a bullet wound on body, saying this was the fatal shot less than 24 hours ago.

The camera pans over to the corner of the room where we can see the man in the three-star beret breaking the fourth wall as he talks to the camera. I guess we can give him a name…that’s Albert Paulsen’s character, Captain Vasquez. He explains that the raid on Alto Saco was the beginning of the end for Guevara. Vasquez says they ambushed his rear guard in La Higueras and encircled him in the Churro Ravine.

We’re no longer in the room with the dead body, now, as the scene shifts to what Vasquez is explaining. Rebel soldiers are being shot at by the Rangers in rocks surrounding the ravine. It’s not just rifles, but the Rangers have mortars as well. One of the rebels is killed. Then another. They’re firing back, and some of the Rangers are shot, too.

The intense fighting continues for a few more moments until we can see Omar Sharif’s version of Che Guevara climbing to get out of the ravine. The rebel machine gun is captured, silencing most of the firing. Che and another man seem to be the only two left, and Che is obviously in a lot of pain.

The Rangers close in as the two rebel soldiers fire back from the cover of rocks. The other man is shot and killed. Che, too, is shot, although he’s not killed. Wounded, he lies back and the shooting stops. The Rangers stand up, walking slowly to where Che is lying on the ground.

Che is still breathing as Captain Vasquez reaches him. Pulling out a photo, Vasquez looks at it and then back down at Che. Then, over the radio, Vasquez announces: Puma to Lancer. Puma to Lancer. We’ve got Papa. Alive. Repeat, we’ve got Papa.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Che!

Transitioning into our fact-check of the 1969 film Che!, I’ll first point out that we did a deep dive into the full movie that I’ll link to in the show notes. For this week’s historical event, though, it got the basic gist correct even if it did change a lot of the details from the true story.

For example, remember the guy leading the Rangers in the movie? We talked about him earlier; he’s the guy with the three stars on his beret. The actor playing him Albert Paulsen, and in the movie it’s a character named Captain Vasquez.

In the true story, the leader of the Bolivian Army’s 2^nd Ranger Battalion was Gary Prado Salmón, who was later promoted to General and a national hero in Bolivia for Che’s capture.

The 2^nd Ranger Battalion was trained especially to target the guerilla fighters. While we didn’t cover it in our movie segment this week, a bit earlier in the film Captain Vasquez tells the camera that the CIA was not involved in any way.

Well, most sources that I found say that even though the 2^nd Rangers were from the Bolivian Army, they did get help from the CIA, as well training from the 8^th Special Forces Group from the U.S. Army. I’ll add a link to the show notes for this episode with a fascinating article by Marco Margaritoff over on the website All That’s Interesting that gives a nice overview of a man named Félix Rodríguez, who was the CIA agent tasked with helping in the capture of Che Guevara.

Something else the movie changes from the real story is the number of soldiers involved. In the movie, it looks like Captain Vasquez has maybe a dozen or so Rangers with him. Granted, they’re often among the rocks and moving around the terrain so it’s hard to track down an exact number.

With that said, though, the 2^nd Ranger Battalion had 650 soldiers in it and about 180 to 200 of them were involved in the capture of Che Guevara on October 8^th, 1967. So, there were a lot more soldiers involved than we see in the movie.

In the true story, the Rangers received word during the early morning hours of October 8^th of a little over a dozen men who had walked through a local farmer’s field the night before. They were going toward a canyon area nearby, so that’s where the Rangers went.

The movie was right to show mortars being used, though, as they used mortars and machine guns along with sections, or platoons, of soldiers set up at different areas in the canyon to help seal off the entrances and exits to the canyon while other soldiers in the Battalion closed in on their targets.

It was a tactic that worked, as before long the Rangers pushed back the guerrillas to where they had nowhere else to go. As for Che Guevara himself, somehow his rifle was destroyed—or at least, rendered unusable, and he was shot in the leg. It was in his right calf, so not a mortal wound but between that and not having a weapon, he was forced to surrender when the Rangers came upon him.

Although this, too, seems to have happened differently than what we see in the movie. I say that because in the movie we see the Captain Vasquez character look down at Che and pull a photo out of his pocket to verify that’s who it is. In the true story, though, one of the Rangers, a Sergeant, later told Che’s biographer that Che was the one to identify himself to them.

Either way, Che Guevara was captured on October 8^th, 1967. The next day, the President of Bolivia ordered Che be put to death. And so, on October 9^th, 1967, the revolutionary Che Guevara was executed at the age of 39.

As a last little side note, when the movie shows Che’s body, we can see a bullet wound in his chest that one of the bystanders mentions as being the fatal shot. Even though Che was executed, that sort of shot would still be accurate because according to some sources, it was the CIA agent Félix Rodríguez who suggested they don’t shoot Che in the head to make it obvious he was executed, but rather to shoot him in a way that would look like he’d been a casualty of a run-in with the Bolivian Army.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, check out the 1969 movie called Che! That’s not to be confused with the 2008 two-part series from Steven Soderbergh that’s also called Che. While that’s another good one to watch this week, the movie we talked about today is the 1969 film with an exclamation point at the end: Che!

And don’t forget we’ve got a deep dive in the show notes that you can queue up right now to hear more about the true story of the entire movie!

October 9, 1919. Chicago, Illinois.

Our next historical event falls on Wednesday this week, and we’ll find a re-enactment of it at about an hour and 22 minutes into the movie called Eight Men Out.

Hitting play on the movie, and we’re at a baseball game.

The crowd seems to be getting ready for the game to start. On the mound for the Chicago White Sox is Lefty Williams. He’s played by James Read in the movie.

<whew> Williams exhales.

There’s text on the screen in the movie saying this is game #8.

Then, Williams winds and offers the first pitch. The batter swings, sending a fly ball into right field. We don’t see how far the ball goes, but what we can see is the reaction from many of the White Sox players who don’t seem happy. Williams returns to the mound with a stern look on his face. He looks into the batter’s box where another hitter steps to the plate.

The camera is just behind the catcher now. We can see Williams wind, and pitch. The batter swings, another hit.

Again, we don’t see where it goes, but we can see a baserunner make it to second base. That must be the guy who got the first hit. Two back-to-back hits, it seems.

In the crowd, Lefty Williams’ wife looks sad.

Back on the mound, Williams is ready for another hitter. He looks at the runner on second. The pitch. Way outside. The catcher has to reach to stop it, but he does. No runners advance. The next pitch.

The batter swings, and Williams’ head snaps around to watch what we can assume is a high fly ball to right field. Again, we can’t see how far it goes, but we can see the catcher throwing his mitt down as a runner crosses the plate to score. The crowd is jeering at Williams, who seems to be starting the game off on a rocky note.

But, the game goes on, and Williams settles in to face the next hitter.

The pitch.

Another high fly ball, this time to left field. It hits the outfield wall, and we can see another runner score as he crosses home plate. Again, the catcher throws his mitt to the ground in disgust. As he does, another runner crosses home plate. Three runs scored so far, and there’s a runner on second.

John Mahoney’s character, Kid Gleason, runs from the White Sox dugout. As he does, he yells, “James, you’re in!”

When he reaches the pitcher’s mound he takes the ball from Williams, ending his day.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Eight Men Out

That sequence comes from the 1988 movie directed by John Sayles called Eight Men Out. The event it’s depicting is the final game of the 16^th World Series, which happened this week in history on October 9^th, 1919.

The movie is historically accurate to show Lefty Williams starting that day for what was game eight of the Series. And it’s also correct to show him giving up a number of hits, but in the movie, it looks like all but one of the hits are going to right field—they weren’t all hit there, but then again, we don’t see where the ball goes in the movie. All we can see are the actor’s reactions to the hits, so maybe that’s nitpicking a little too much.

Here’s the true story.

The first hitter to face Lefty Williams in game eight of the 1919 World Series was the Cincinnati Reds’ second baseman, Morrie Rath. He popped out to start the game. The second hitter was the Reds first baseman Jake Daubert. He hit a single to center field. Next up was Heinie Groh, the third baseman. He smacked another single, this one to right field a lot like we see in the movie. It also allowed Daubert to advance from first to second, just like we see in the movie.

Next up for the Reds was their cleanup hitter, the center fielder Edd Roush. He smashed a double to right field, allowing Daubert to score and Groh moved to third base.

I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest the White Sox catcher got so fed up by the pitcher Williams giving up these hits that he threw his mitt on the ground like we see happening in the movie. But the movie was correct to show that catcher for the White Sox being Ray Schalk. He’s played by Gordon Clapp in the movie.

The next batter for the Reds was their left fielder, Pat Duncan. He hit a double to left field, driving in Groh from third and Roush from second. At this point, the Reds were up 3-0 with one out in the first inning.

The White Sox manager had seen enough. Just like we see him doing in the movie, Kid Gleason took out his starter and put in the right-handed reliever Bill James.

To establish a bit of context that we don’t see in the movie, the 26-year-old Lefty Williams was the White Sox #2 starter. His real name, by the way, is Claude. “Lefty” was just a nickname. And yes, he was a left-handed pitcher.

In 1919, Lefty had a stellar record of 23 wins to 11 losses with an ERA of 2.64. That’s spread across 297 innings. In fact, Williams not only led the White Sox with 125 strikeouts, he led the majors that season with 40 games started and he tied the White Sox #1 starter, Eddie Cicotte, with five shutouts.

So, Williams had a fantastic season in 1919.

His playoff record wasn’t so great, as he went 0-3 giving up 12 earned runs across 16.1 innings pitched for an ERA of 6.61. And while we didn’t talk about what happened the night before the game, there are a lot of people who believe Lefty Williams was given an ultimatum.

What really happened is one of those moments behind closed doors that we’ll just never know for sure.

As the story goes, Williams was visited by an associate of the bookie and gambler who had offered cash to the White Sox players in exchange for them throwing games. That same story suggests this unnamed associate told Williams that either he purposely lose his next start or else his wife and child would pay the consequences.

And so, as we know from what happened publicly, Lefty Williams had a terrible game. He gave up three runs and couldn’t even get through the first inning before being pulled. The Reds would go on to win the game 10-5, and by extension, the World Series overall, five games to three.

The allegations of throwing the Series hit the White Sox almost immediately, earning the team the nickname “Black Sox” for the scandal. It also changed Major League Baseball as the owners gave over control to establish the position of the Commissioner of Baseball, a position that still exists today, in an attempt to give public trust in the sport again. It’d also end up with eight players from the White Sox being permanently banned from Major League Baseball—hence the title of the movie, Eight Men Out.

One of those players who was permanently banned was Lefty Williams.

So, if you’re feeling like a sports movie to watch this week, check out the 1988 film called Eight Men Out!

And if you want to learn more about the true story, after you watch the movie, we compared that with history back on episode #132 of Based on a True Story. Or, if you want to take a super deep dive, the entire second season of another fantastic podcast called Infamous America is dedicated to the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. You can find a link to that in the show notes for this episode.

October 12, 1492. The Bahamas.

From the baseball field in the last movie, to the Bahamas, our next movie is the 1992 movie called 1492: Conquest of Paradise. About 54 minutes into the movie, we’ll find this week’s event as we can see two large ships. There’s one in the foreground and another a little distance away, and they’re not moving at all. In fact, the night before in the movie, we saw the anchors land in the water.

Today, we’re seeing smaller boats departing the large ships and heading toward the land we can see in the distance. Lush, green trees and sandy beaches make this scene look like what you’d expect for sailors on ships in the 1400s to be making landfall on an island in the Caribbean.

Because of the camera angles in the movie, it’s hard to see exactly how many boats are leaving the larger ships but I counted at least five in a single frame. Each boat is filled with men, and each boat is carrying flags of orange, yellow, purple, and many bright colors.

The camera focuses on one of the men as he jumps off the boat into the water. The movie goes into slow motion, capturing the moment as he splashes into the waist-deep water. He continues to walk in slow motion, each footstep splashing into the water.

He falls to his knees just beyond the waves in a gesture of appreciation. The camera cuts to other men jumping off the boats now. Some are running onto the land, others are falling onto the sandy beach—overall, it’s a scene that makes it obvious they haven’t seen land for quite some time. Dry land is a welcome sight.

Then, the movie gives us the location and the date. Guanahani Island. 12^th of October 1492.

The man who was on his knees gets up now. He’s approached by a colorfully dressed man.

“Don Christopher,” he says, as he unravels a scroll. Christopher signs something on the scroll. Then he speaks, “By the grace of God, in the name of their gracious Majesties of Castilla and Aragon…”

He pauses for a moment to turn around to the men who are all lined up on the beach now.

“…by all the powers vested in me, I claim this island and name it San Salvador.”

Then, the camera backs up to show the line of men as they start walking inland.

The true story behind that scene in the movie 1942: Conquest of Paradise!

That is a sequence from the 1992 movie called 1492: Conquest of Paradise. The event it’s depicting is Christopher Columbus making his first landing after the long trip across the ocean from Europe.

That happened this week in history, on October 12^th, 1492, right away let’s clarify the ships themselves. In the sequence we talked about today, we could only see two ships at any one time in the movie. In the true story, Columbus sailed with three ships: Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

That we only saw two in the sequence we talked about today isn’t really a point against the movie for historical accuracy—we do see three ships at different points in the movie. It’s just the sequence for October 12^th doesn’t really show all three ships at one time.

With that said, there has been a lot of debate among historians about exactly where Columbus landed.

According to Columbus himself, it was on an island called Guanahani. That’s the name we see mentioned in the movie.

The name, Guanahani, is the Taino name for the island. Just like we see in the movie, Columbus named the island San Salvador upon his arrival. I’m not sure if he did it the moment he landed on the beach like we see in the movie, but then again, Columbus thought he landed in East Asia at first. He didn’t know he actually landed in a chain of islands we now know as the Bahamas.

The name he gave the island is derived from the Spanish “Isla San Salvador” or, in English, “Island of the Holy Savior.”

As a little side note, the name “Guanahani” means “Small Land in the Upper Waters” in the Taino language. The Taino language, in turn, used to be the most popular language in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus’ landing…but that language is extinct now. Also, in the 17^th century, the island was called Waitlings Island after an Englishman who landed there. In 1925, the island was officially renamed to San Salvador.

In 1971, Columbus Day became an officially recognized Federal holiday in the United States—but that recognition has changed in recent years. The observance of the holiday doesn’t always land on October 12^th, but at least now you know a little more about the history behind the event that happened this week in history.

If you want to dig further into the story, of course you can watch the movie called 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

Even that title is a bit controversial when you consider how Columbus landed on lands owned by people who already lived there and conquered them.

Remember when I mentioned the Taino language is extinct now? Well, that’s just one example of something lost to history since Columbus’ landing. There has been a lot of controversy over his and other colonists’ actions.

As a result, in 1992, Berkeley, California became the first city in the United States to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day. Cities like Austin, Seattle, and Philadelphia, or states like Maine, South Dakota, and Alaska, among many others have dropped Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Here in Oklahoma where I’m recording this from right now, many here celebrate Native American Day instead.

So, if you’re looking for something to watch this week, the movie we talked about in this segment is called 1492: Conquest of Paradise. The landing sequence happens at about 54 minutes into the movie. If you watch the movie, or even if you just want to dig deeper into the history, scroll back to episode #186 of Based on a True Story where we covered that movie and the true story behind it.

Historical birthdays from the movies

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On October 9^th, 1895, Eugene Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia. He is considered to be the first African American military pilot to fly in combat. And even though he was born in the United States, he flew for the French during WWI—he was rejected by the U.S. military. He’s one of those historical figures that I wish there was a biopic about his life, but if you want to see a movie in his honor this week, then I’d recommend the 2012 movie called Red Tails. Now, right up front, I’ll let you know that movie is not about Eugene Bullard. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, but the filmmakers honored Bullard’s memory by having the commander in the movie be named Col. A.J. Bullard. He’s played by Terrence Howard in the movie.

On October 11, 1884, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City, New York. She’s better known by her middle name: Eleanor Roosevelt, and as the First Lady of the United States during World War II while her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or just FDR as he’s called, was president. And yes, I did a double-check on that too…Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name was Roosevelt, and she married Franklin Roosevelt so both her maiden and married name was Roosevelt. Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins once removed. This week’s recommendation portraying Eleanor on screen is called The First Lady, the 2022 series from Showtime. Eleanor Roosevelt is played by Gillian Anderson.

On October 13^th, 1537, Jane Grey was born in Bradgate, England. At least, that’s the date often given for her birthdate—hers is one of those birthdays in history that we’re not 100% sure of. She’s often known as Lady Jane Grey, or sometimes as the Nine Days’ Queen, because she was Queen of England for only nine days. Her name earned more fame when Mark Twain used her as a character in his novel from 1882 called The Prince and the Pauper. So, most movie adaptations of that will have someone playing Lady Jane. My recommendation this week, though, is the 2022 series from Starz called Becoming Elizabeth. As you can tell from the title, it’s more about Queen Elizabeth I, but Lady Jane is played by Bella Ramsey in that series. So, if you’re a fan of The Last of Us, maybe you’ll enjoy seeing Bella star in another series.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

This week’s movie premiere from history is the film directed by Paul Greengrass called Captain Phillips, which was released in the U.S. 11 years ago this week on October 11^th, 2013.

In the movie, Tom Hanks portrays the lead role of Captain Richard Phillips, who takes command of the cargo ship called the Maersk Alabama. Despite the name, the Maersk Alabama’s home port according to the movie is the Port of Salalah in Oman.

When he’s given orders to take the vessel to Mombasa, Kenya, that takes him past the Horn of Africa where there has been some known pirate activity. So, along with the help of the first officer, Michael Chernus’ version of Shane Murphy, as they get underway, they go through their security protocols.

That’s when they notice a couple small boats following their massive ship.

Fearing they’re pirates, Captain Phillips calls for aid from a nearby warship. Of course, there’s not really a warship, but the pirates don’t know that. And Captain Phillips knows the pirates don’t know that, but he also knows they’re listening to the radio, so he thinks maybe if they think the military is nearby that’ll scare them off.

And it sort of works. One of the two skiffs turns around, while the other loses power in the wake of the huge cargo ship.

But they’re not in the clear yet, because the next day, one of the skiffs filled with pirates returns to the chase. Since their boat is much smaller, it’s also faster, and before long the armed pirates manage to attach their ladder to the Maersk Alabama and climb aboard despite the best efforts of the cargo ship’s crew to stop them. Then, the pirates seize control of the ship at gunpoint, and very soon it becomes clear to Captain Phillips that the pirates intend to ransom off the crew and ship for the insurance money.

The leader of the pirates is a guy named Abduwali Muse, who is played by Barkhad Abdi in the movie.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long for the U.S. military to actually find out the Maersk Alabama has been taken over by the pirates. After all, they’re wanting the insurance money, so the pirates aren’t trying to hide the fact that they took over the ship. So, the U.S. Navy launches a destroyer called USS Bainbridge under the command of Frank Castellano. He’s played by Yul Vazquez in the movie.

Things descend into a fight between the mostly unarmed crew and very well-armed pirates aboard the cargo ship. I say “mostly” unarmed, because we do see things like the crew using a knife to try and hold Muse hostage and force all the pirates to leave in a lifeboat. But, they won’t do that unless Captain Phillips goes with them. Trying not to make matters worse, Phillips goes along with the pirates in exchange for them leaving the rest of the crew on the Maersk Alabama.

Meanwhile, on the lifeboat, the pirates beat and blindfold Captain Phillips in what has now become a kidnapping situation as well. We see Bainbridge enter the picture and try to get to a peaceful solution. As part of that process, they hook up the lifeboat to Bainbridge so it’s being towed by the destroyer while inviting the pirate leader, Muse, to Bainbridge to negotiate. He agrees, and in the movie, we also see SEAL Team Six from the U.S. Navy setting up snipers to try and take out the pirates.

Near the climax at the end of the movie, the U.S. Navy pulls off a perfectly timed maneuver that involves stopping their tow of the lifeboat to throw the pirates off balance just as three snipers from the destroyer take three simultaneous shots and kill three of the pirates at the exact same moment.

The movie ends with Muse being the only pirate left alive. He’s arrested and taken into custody as Captain Phillips is rescued from the lifeboat and treated for his injuries.

The true story behind Captain Phillips

Before we compare the true story with the movie, I do want to point out that we did a deep dive into the full movie back on episode #28 of Based on a True Story so I’ll link that in the show notes if you want to give that a listen as well.

For today’s purposes, though, let’s start with the overview of the people in the story.

The character Tom Hanks is playing in the movie, Captain Phillips, is a real person. As of this recording, he’s still alive. Actually, it’s his book that the movie is based on. That book is called A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea. I’ll throw a link to that in the show notes, too.

The pirate leader, Abduwali Muse, is also a real person who is also still alive as of this recording—he’s currently serving a 33-year prison sentence in Terre Haute, Indiana, which means unless something changes between now and then, Muse will be released in 2038, by which time he’ll be 48 years old.

That’s right, Muse was just 18 years old when all this happened in April of 2009. Or…maybe he was 19, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Some of the other characters in the movie are real people, too, like USS Bainbridge’s Commander Frank Castellano, and some other more background crew in the movie are based on real people but with some fictionalization thrown in to help tell the story.

But, of course, there’s always more to the true story that we don’t see in the movie.

So, let’s go back to April 8^th, 2009, because that’s when our true story starts.

Maersk Alabama really is the name of the ship that was hijacked by pirates that day. The name comes from the Danish shipping company headquartered out of Copenhagen called Maersk. They’re a massive company who has been around since 1928, although it’s worth mentioning that Maersk Alabama was registered under a U.S. flag.

That’s because technically Maersk Alabama in 2009 was run by Maersk Line, a division of Maersk that’s based out of Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States. As a little side note, after the timeline of the movie, Maersk Alabama was sold to another company and renamed to MV Tygra. As of this recording, she’s still in operation on the seas.

While I didn’t notice the movie mentioning this, in the true story when she was hijacked that marked the first time a ship bearing the U.S. flag was seized by pirates since the 1800s.

With that said, though, the movie is correct to show the crew on Maersk Alabama preparing for a possible pirate attack because Maersk Alabama was actually the sixth ship to be attacked by pirates just that week! The other ships just weren’t bearing a U.S. flag, but everyone was aware of how dangerous the waters were.

The movie is correct to show that she was heading from Salalah, Oman, to Mombasa, Kenya. On board, she was carrying 401 containers of primarily food aid for refugees in countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia, etc.

Any training the crew had done prior turned into reality when the true story behind the movie began on April 8^th, 2009. Just like we see in the movie, that’s when four pirates attacked the ship armed with AK-47s. We learned that Muse was just 18 or 19 years old at the time of the attack, and that actually became an issue in the subsequent trial because at first there were questions about whether or not he could even be tried as an adult.

According to Robert Gates, who was the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time, the four pirates were between 17 and 19 years old, although Muse’s own mother said he was only 16 at the time. At the time, some suggested perhaps she said that so Muse wouldn’t be tried as an adult, but regardless, for our purposes today it’s safe to say all the pirates who boarded Maersk Alabama that day were teenagers.

The movie is also correct to show the purpose for the pirates was to get the insurance money for Maersk Alabama. As we just learned, there were a lot of other ships captured at the time—actually, even the fishing vessel the pirates used as their own “mother ship,” so to speak, was one they hijacked. That was the FV Win Far 161, which was a 700-tonnes Taiwanese ship that Somali pirates captured on April 6^th, 2009, and then used to launch the smaller skiffs to hijack even more ships.

We don’t see any of that in the movie since it’s mostly focused on Maersk Alabama, but FV Win Far 161 was eventually released by pirates in early 2010.

Back to the true story aboard Maersk Alabama, though, after being boarded by the pirates, the ship’s Chief Engineer and First Assistant Engineer, Mike Perry and Matt Fisher, respectively, worked to remove steering and engine control from the bridge, and shut down the ship’s systems. In other words, the ship went dead in the water.

Just like we see in the movie, the pirates boarded the ship and went right to the bridge. That’s where they captured Captain Phillips along with other crew, and they also found out they weren’t able to control the ship thanks to what Perry and Fisher did down below. And as we just learned, the pirates were very young and they were not highly trained engineers like Perry and Fisher so couldn’t really do anything about it themselves without help from Maersk Alabama’s crew—which, obviously, they weren’t inclined to do!

Of course, that doesn’t mean the pirates didn’t try to convince the ship’s crew to get it going again. While they held Captain Phillips in the bridge, Muse went in search of the rest of the cargo ship’s crew to do exactly that. And as you can probably guess, that was something the pirates intended to do at gunpoint.

But here’s where the movie shows the Maersk Alabama crew start fighting back, because for all they knew the pirates were going to sail the ship back to Somalia if they got it moving again…and that wouldn’t bode well for them.

Before I mentioned Mike Perry, the Chief Engineer; he’s played by David Warshofsky in the movie. While I didn’t mention this earlier, while the pirates were boarding the ship and trying to figure out why the controls didn’t work in the bridge, the rest of the Maersk Alabama’s crew hid in a secure hold in the ship. Remember, they had prepared for a possible pirate attack, so kind of like you have a plan for where you’ll go in case of emergency—so did they.

Mike Perry, though, hid himself outside of the secure room. His plan was to try and capture one of the pirates so he could trade the pirate for Captain Phillips. Basically, a prisoner exchange. So, when Muse walked by looking for crew, Perry jumped him with a knife and managed to subdue the teenager. Then, they offered the exchange to the pirates in the bridge. The movie gets that pretty accurate, too, because the offer was for the pirates to get their leader back, Muse, as well as all the cash they had on the ship—there was $30,000 in the ship’s safe, and then they also offered the pirates the use of the Maersk Alabama’s lifeboat for them to get off the ship.

Keeping in mind, again, that the pirates were teenagers who no doubt were feeling a little overwhelmed and unable to move the massive ship, they agreed to the deal. So, the crew released Muse with the cash and expected the pirates to hold up their end of the bargain.

But, things didn’t go according to plan. Instead, the pirates took Captain Phillips into the 28-foot lifeboat with them. So, now, the four pirates are off the Maersk Alabama, but now it’s also a hostage situation.

In the movie, we see the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Bainbridge get called into the picture around this time, and that is true. But, in the true story, the USS Bainbridge was not the only U.S. Navy ship involved—because, as we learned earlier—the Maersk Alabama was also not the only ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates recently. So, there was a U.S. Navy presence in the area. There was another frigate, USS Halyburton, who was sent to deal with the hostage situation alongside Bainbridge.

And something else we don’t see in the movie is that the pirates’ ships also started to converge on the situation. Remember when we talked about the Taiwanese fishing vessel the pirates used as a “mother ship” of sorts? Well, as the Navy arrived on scene, so, too, did about four other ships all under pirate control. On those four ships were the crew held hostage by the pirates, so over 50 hostages from countries around the world.

Since Maersk Alabama was the only U.S. ship hijacked, though, and Captain Phillips was the captain of said ship…that’s why the movie’s story focuses more on the U.S.-centric version of the story. Also, because it’s based on Captain Phillips’ book, of course.

So, if you recall, the pirates boarded Maersk Alabama on April 8^th. On April 9^th, the Bainbridge and Halyburton arrived on scene and stayed just outside of the range of fire from the pirates. Instead, they used UAVs to get intelligence on the lifeboat and the situation as a whole.

By the way, the lifeboat is a covered lifeboat. The movie shows it pretty well, but if you’re like me and you think of the Titanic lifeboats—well, this happened in 2009 and not 1912, so obviously the lifeboat is a little different haha! Before long, the Navy made contact with the lifeboat and started to try negotiating with the pirates for Captain Phillips’ release—as well as the 54 other hostages on the other pirate-held boats.

On April 10^th, another Navy ship, the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Boxer arrived at the scene, and negotiations continued with the pirates. The next day, everything changed when the pirates fired on USS Halyburton. No one was hurt, and Halyburton didn’t shoot back—no doubt not wanting to make things worse. I mean, Halyburton isn’t the world’s largest military ship, but it’s still a 453-foot-long battle-ready military ship with an array of armaments that could easily take out the 28-foot lifeboat if they really wanted to.

With Captain Phillips still held hostage on the lifeboat, though, Halyburton held their fire.

We don’t really see this in the movie, but in the true story’s timeline, April 11^th was also when Maersk Alabama finally arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, with the rest of the ship’s crew who had gotten it back underway after the pirates made their escape in the lifeboat. The U.S. Navy was involved in that, too, and escorted Maersk Alabama the rest of the way to ensure no other pirates would try to capture her again.

Meanwhile, back in the hostage situation, when the pirates fired on Halyburton, the U.S. Navy’s position changed from attempting to negotiate a release, to arranging a rescue. To help with that, they managed to convince Muse to come aboard Bainbridge for the negotiations the following day, April 12^th.

And so, the end of the movie is quite accurate to the end of the true story.

With Muse aboard Bainbridge, three SEAL Team Six snipers coordinated to simultaneously shoot the remaining three pirates on the lifeboat at the same time. Then, the Navy swooped in to rescue Captain Phillips, and with no more hostage to negotiate, Muse was arrested aboard Bainbridge. They never did find the $30,000, although some conspiracies have arisen that perhaps members of the SEAL Team Six took it before anyone else noticed—that’s never been proven one way or the other, though.

After the situation was handled at sea, Muse was taken back to the United States where he stood trial. Despite what his mother said about him being 16, Muse himself said he was 18, so he was tried as an adult. A few weeks later, in May of 2009, Captain Phillips sold his story to be told in what would become both the 2010 memoir from Phillips as well as the 2013 Paul Greengrass-directed movie we’ve learned about today.

September 30th, 331 BCE. Persia.

We’ll start this week by going back into ancient history from the 2004 Alexander movie.

Just a few minutes into the beginning of the movie we’ll find an event from this week in history as the camera pans across the desert. There are a few clouds in the sky, but it’s hardly a blue sky—more of a hazy mix of gray and an orange that, along with the sand in front of us, makes for a very one-colored landscape.

There’s some text on the screen telling us we’re in Gaugamela, Persia. That’s in modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan.

As we see a man on a horse, another man’s voice is narrating the story. He says it was mad. 40,000 of us against hundreds of thousands of them under Darius. East and West had come together to decide the fate of the known world.

That night, the soldiers camp in the desert. Collin Ferrell’s version of Alexander the Great looks at the moon along with Jared Leto’s character, Hephaestion. He says the moon is a bad omen, to which Alexander says it’s a bad omen for Darius.

They go on, talking a bit more about the battle to come before Alexander goes to his tent while Hephaestion walks off.

The next day, the sun is bright in the sky. We see scores of soldiers marching. The camera cuts between Alexander offering up a cow as a sacrifice and the feet of scores of marching soldiers. Dust gets kicked up as they’re marching. Immediately above the soldiers, the sky is darkened with the lines of long spears carried by the soldiers.

After the sacrifice is made, Alexander jumps on his horse and the camera flies into the sky for an overhead view. Among the sand in the desert, the soldiers are too many to count. The lines of soldiers we can see quickly fade into the dust and sand being kicked up as the men are marching. The battle is about to begin.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Alexander

In the show notes I’ll have a link to the deep dive that we did back on episode #157 of Based on a True Story for the entire movie, but for this week’s event, I actually backed up a day to September 30^th because what we just watched in the movie are the events leading up to the Battle of Gaugamela that happened on October 1^st, 331 BCE when Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia.

The movie’s mention of 40,000 men against hundreds of thousands is a generalization, but it’s close enough. In the true story, Alexander had 47,000 soldiers under his command while Darius had anywhere from 50,000 to over a million soldiers.

As you can imagine, that’s a huge discrepancy in the numbers. But I guess that’s something that can happen about an event that took place thousands of years ago.

And to be fair, most historians today dispute there being over a million soldiers—that comes from some ancient sources. For example, a Greek historian who lived at the time, Arrian, estimated 40,000 cavalry and 1,000,000 infantry for the Persians. Another ancient historian estimated 800,000 infantry and 200,000 cavalry. Another estimated just 1,000,000 troops without breaking them down into cavalry and infantry. Yet another said 45,000 cavalry and only 200,000 infantry.

Only.

200,000 is still a huge army for a battle. But, you get the point of how conflicting accounts make it difficult to know exactly how many were there. Generally, modern estimates range between 50,000 and 120,000 soldiers altogether for the Persians.

On the Greek side, most historians agree the army under the command of Alexander the Great was about 47,000. There seems to be less dispute about that, but anyway you look at it, the Greeks were outnumbered.

Perhaps that’s one reason why the battle is something we still talk about to this day.

Times were different in 331 BCE, and both Darius and Alexander themselves led the attack with their soldiers. After some intense fighting, the decisive blow took place when Alexander charged with a giant wedge of soldiers against the Persian infantry. They managed to weaken the Persian center where Darius was located.

Remember the name Arrian that I mentioned a moment ago? Arrian was a Greek historian who lived from around 86 to around 160 CE, so he wasn’t alive during 331 BCE when the battle was—but, of course, he was still closer to the events than we are today. Arrian’s book called The Anabasis of Alexander is one of the best sources we have about Alexander the Great.

Here’s a quote from Arrian about the turning point in the Battle of Gaugamela:

For a short time there ensued a hand-to-hand fight; but when the Macedonian cavalry, commanded by Alexander himself, pressed on vigorously, thrusting themselves against the Persians and striking their faces with their spears, and when the Macedonian phalanx in dense array and bristling with long pikes had also made an attack upon them, all things together appeared full of terror to Darius, who had already long been in a state of fear, so that he was the first to turn and flee.

By the end of October 1^st, Alexander won what many consider one of his finest and most decisive victories in the face of overwhelming odds. On the other side, the Persian King Darius III did manage to escape on horseback, but it was considered to be the beginning of the end for the First Persian Empire, which later fell completely to the Greeks and Alexander the Great.

October 1st, 1961. New York.

Our next event happened on Tuesday this week, and we’ll find it about an hour and 52 minutes into the made-for-TV movie called 61*.

We’re on a baseball field. The camera dollies down just behind home plate, so we can see a perfect angle of the batter, catcher, and umpire on the right side of the camera frame. On the left side, the pitcher stands on the mound. In the distance behind them is the crowd in the stands.

At the plate is number 9, and we can see from the uniform he’s on the New York Yankees. After a few moments, he gets into position in the batter’s box. The pitcher, wearing a Boston Red Sox away uniform, nods to the catcher the approval of the next pitch. Then, he winds, and throws.

The batter swings. We can hear the crack of the bat as the ball goes soaring into right field. The announcer is excited. It’s going back, back…the camera cuts to the crowd in the outfield looking up. The outfielder races to the fence, tracking the ball. He gets to the wall just in time to see the ball land a few rows into the stands.

And the crowd goes wild!

The true story behind that scene in the movie 61*

That short sequence in the movie is a depiction of Roger Maris hitting his 61^st home run of the 1961 season, breaking Babe Ruth’s record that he had set in 1927. We’ll learn more about that and the movie’s title in a moment, but before we do that, let’s do our fact-check of the movie because it is correct to show Maris hitting his 61^st homer off the Red Sox, but there’s more to the story that we don’t see there.

It was the final game of the 1961 season when the New York Yankees were playing their rivals, the Boston Red Sox. On the mound for the Red Sox was a rookie starter by the name of Tracy Stallard. Technically, Stallard had his major league debut the year prior in 1960, but he only had four appearances that year, so he qualified as a rookie in 1961.

That day, Stallard managed to get Roger Maris to pop out to left field during his first at bat. That was in the first inning. Maris came to bat again in the fourth. On a 2-0 pitch, Maris hit a fastball into the right field stands for his 61^st home run.

Oh, I mentioned the asterisk in the movie’s title of 61*. The reason for that is because in 1961, the American League expanded with the Los Angeles Angels and Washington Senators joining the league—the previous Washington Senators moved to Minneapolis after the 1960 season to become the Minnesota Twins. With more teams in the league, they decided to change the number of games played from 154 to 162. 1961 was the first year the American League did that, the National League didn’t follow with the 162-game season until the following year, 1962.

So, when Roger Maris was on his record-setting season in 1961, baseball was in the midst of a lot of changes. Not only the expanded number of games, but with new teams in the league that meant there were a lot of players in the majors who had just been called up from the minors.

In other words, a lot of people felt the teams were not quite as good as they had been just a year prior with 50 more players added to the league in the two brand-new expansion teams.

And, in a nutshell, that’s why the asterisk is on Maris’ record. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 154 games. In 154 games of the 1961 season, Roger Maris had 59 home runs. It wasn’t until the final game of the 162-game season for Roger Maris to hit his 61^st home run. Since it took Maris more games to break the record, a lot of people questioned whether or not the record was a legitimate record.

More specifically, it was a New York sportswriter named Dick Young who suggested the asterisk. Officially, the Commissioner of Baseball removed any asterisk from Maris’ record in 1991, but whether or not there’s an asterisk is still something many people debate today, due in large part to the 1998 season. That’s when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke Maris’ record with Sosa hitting 66 home runs and McGwire hitting 70 home runs. That record would then be broken three years later when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in the 2001 season. None of those three players, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds, have been inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame because of their alleged use of PEDs.

So, that started to bring up Maris’ record again because if he had the asterisk in his, should Sosa, McGwire and/or Bonds have one? For some baseball fans, the debate continues to this day.

As a little side note, it’s worth pointing out that Maris’ record of 61 home runs was still the most by a New York Yankee until Aaron Judge hit 62 in 2022.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, though, check out the 2001 movie called 61*. Roger Maris’ at-bat with the 61^st home run starts at about an hour and 52 minutes into the movie.

Oh, and since I mentioned Babe Ruth, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it was also this week in history when Babe Ruth’s called shot took place. That was on October 1^st, 1932.

The New York Yankees were playing the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field for game three of the World Series when things got to be pretty chippy on the field with players on both sides doing their fair share of name-calling. When Babe Ruth came to bat in the fifth inning, he made a gesture that looks like he was pointing to the center field bleachers. Then, sure enough, he hit a home run right to those center field bleachers.

Was he calling his shot? This is another thing that’s up for debate. Some people say that’s exactly what he was doing. Footage of the event that you can find online certainly looks like that could be what he’s doing. But, again, it’s footage from 1932 so not quite the high-definition footage we have today. Some say he wasn’t calling his shot but simply gesturing his bat toward fans or other players or something else.

Regardless of what you believe, no one can deny that Babe Ruth calling his shot is an event that has gone down in sports history, and it happened this week.

Oh, and to bring it back to movies, there is a scene about 11 minutes into the 1984 movie The Natural where a nicknamed “The Whammer” that’s supposed to be kind of like Babe Ruth called his shot in a contest between himself and the star of the movie, Robert Redford’s character, Roy Hobbs.

Of course, that happens in a contest at a fair and not the World Series. “The Whammer” may have been based on Babe Ruth, but he’s a fictional character. Just like Roy Hobbs is a fictional character. So, that scene may only be inspired by a true story, but it’s enough of a reason to watch The Natural if you’re looking for more baseball movies to watch this week!

The last baseball movie I’d recommend is a documentary, not a fictional movie. It’s called Say Hey, Willie Mays! from HBO and as you can probably guess it’s all about Willie Mays. I’m throwing that into the baseball recommendation this week because it was actually last week in history when Willie Mays made what we now know simply as “The Catch.”

That happened during game one of the World Series on September 29^th, 1954. With the score tied 2-2 in the 8^th inning, Vic Wertz of the Cleveland Indians hit a fly ball to deep center field. It traveled some 420 feet or so, that’s about 130 meters, before Willie Mays made an over-the-shoulder catch while sprinting from where he had been positioned in shallow center field. In a single motion, he caught the ball, spun around and threw the ball back to the infield preventing any runners from advancing. It was such an amazing play that it’s been regarded as one of the greatest plays in sports.

So, hop in the show notes for lots of great baseball movies from this week in history!

October 3, 1993. Mogadishu, Somalia.

Our third event falls on Thursday this week, and we’ll find it about 43 minutes into the movie called Black Hawk Down as we find ourselves in the middle of Mogadishu, Somalia. There’s dirt street lined with buildings on either side. Driving down the street is a line of American Humvees, each vehicle is equipped with a machine gun at the top and manned by a soldier in full uniform. As they move forward, people in the streets start running the opposite direction as the Humvees. Whatever is about to go down, these civilians don’t want to get involved and I don’t blame them.

The camera changes angles now and we’re transported to the helicopters flying over the city, offering air support to the Humvees below. It looks like there are four helicopters, each of them loaded full of American soldiers so much so they we can see them sitting partially hanging out the open doors on either side of the helicopters.

Down on the ground, we’re inside a local resident’s car now. He watches as the four helicopters touch down in a line on the street. As the helicopters touch down, the soldiers jump out with their weapons ready. Another helicopter touches down on the top of a nearby building, the soldiers inside hopping out to get an overhead view of the street.

Almost immediately, these soldiers open fire on armed men across the way on another building. The four helicopters lift back off, leaving the soldiers on the ground. Or, well, some on the rooftops, as I just mentioned, but you know what I mean—they’re not on the helicopters anymore.

The camera angle shows us the helicopters leaving and then behind them we can see three more larger helicopters arriving.

But we don’t see much more of that yet as the camera changes again, following some of the soldiers who are entering one of the buildings. Weapons hot, they open fire on people inside. We can’t even see who they are before the soldiers shoot them, although it looks like they’re carrying weapons.

Back outside, the three larger military helicopters are taking up a triangle sort of positioning around a single building. On that building is the word “Olympic.”

These helicopters don’t touch down, but instead, they’re hovering low to the ground as ropes are thrown out either side. By this point, the blades on the helicopters have kicked up so much dirt and dust from the streets below that the normally blue sky has a tint of orange to it as we see from ground level the American soldiers rappel from the ropes.

Back with the Humvees, that line stops now. It’s hard to tell where they’re located from what we’re seeing in the movie. Quickly the movie cuts to another scene of American soldiers kicking in a door. Inside, a bunch of men put their hands up at the sight of the soldiers pointing their rifles at them.

There is someone firing at the Americans, forcing them to take cover.

One of the soldiers from the Humvees looks around the corner to see a helicopter hovering in the street with more American soldiers rappelling down the ropes. So, I guess the Humvees must be just around the corner from the helicopters by the “Olympic” building.

The four smaller helicopters from earlier aren’t anywhere to be seen, and now the three larger helicopters are flying away, too. Except they’re not going far. We can hear what must be the pilots talking to each other, talking about how chalk’s on the ground, so now they’re going to go into a holding pattern to provide sniper cover from the air.

Down below, things are getting more intense as a truck filled with armed men shows up and begins firing back at the American soldiers on the ground. Among the machine gun and rifles, we can see some of the men running up the stairs to a rooftop carrying rocket-propelled grenades: RPGs.

Back inside one of the helicopters, a soldier sees the RPG coming right at them. The pilot manages to move the helicopter out of the way just in time. A soldier on the ropes who was rappelling to the ground loses his grip and falls to the ground—we can’t see him hit because there’s so much dirt being kicked up by the helicopters that he just falls into the abyss.

Another soldier hops out to help his fallen comrade. The soldier who fell isn’t moving. The Americans and Somalis continue shooting at each other. After a while, the action shifts and we can hear the soldiers talking about as it’s time for extraction. We can see some men who seem to be prisoners from one of the rooms the soldiers burst into being guarded as they walk back to where the helicopters pick them up.

The armed resistance is increasing, though, and we can see an armed man leading a couple others with RPGs. Finding a view from below, he instructs them to shoot at one of the helicopters. The Americans inside see the RPG, but not before the tail is hit. A burst of flame and smoke pours out of the tail as the helicopter starts spinning around. Inside, alarms are beeping. Back at the command post, we can see the man in charge of the American’s mission stand up as he watches a screen with the smoking helicopter.

“Wolcott’s bird is hit,” we can hear someone saying.

Down below the American soldiers look up in disbelief as the helicopter continues to spin out of control.

“Super six-one is going down,” we can hear one of the soldiers saying.

Inside the helicopter, the pilot yells at the other men to hold on. Alarms continue beeping as he tries to control the ‘copter. The spinning helicopter manages to make it to a clearing between buildings before it crashes in a huge plume of smoke and dirt.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Black Hawk Down

That sequence comes from the 2001 film directed by Ridley Scott called Black Hawk Down, and it depicts an event that really did happen this week in history when not one, but two Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down on October 3^rd, 1993, in what we now know as the Battle of Mogadishu.

Or, I guess, because of the movie and the book it’s based on it’s also often referred to simply as the “Black Hawk Down Incident.”

What we didn’t get to hear in the brief description leading up to the events of October 3^rd was the reason the American soldiers were there that day.

In a nutshell, Somalia had just had a military coup by a group called the Somali National Alliance, or SNA, led by a man named Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Soon after, the United Nations launched an operation to offer food and relief supplies to the country’s affected citizens. So, from an overall perspective, that’s why the American soldiers were there as a part of the United Nations’ mission.

The mission for that particular day, October 3^rd, 1993, was to try and capture some of the SNA’s senior leadership. If you recall, the movie shows a building with the word “Olympic” on it. That would be a point for the movie’s historical accuracy, because it is true that intel had placed some of Aidid’s leadership in a building near the Olympic Hotel.

The movie also got the timing right.

By 3:40 PM, the four helicopters we see at first in the movie arrived. The movie doesn’t say exactly what they are, but they’re Boeing MH-6 Little Bird light helicopters. Their purpose that day was to carry rockets and ammo while authorized to kill any SNA soldiers who shot at them.

Down below, the noise of the helicopters had alerted Somalis in the city of their presence. The Americans’ mission was all about speed and by 4:00 PM, the Delta Force commandos had completed their mission and successfully captured 24 of Aidid’s senior leadership.

“Laurie” was the code word given to let everyone know the prisoners were secured and it was time to go home.

And just like we see in the movie, that’s when everything went wrong for the Americans when an RPG hit one of the Black Hawk helicopters. That was at 4:20 PM, so not long after the prisoners were secured.

In the movie, we hear them talking about Super Six-One, which is true because that was the designation for the MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that was shot down.

All of a sudden, the mission wasn’t just about getting out of there with the prisoners anymore. They had to rescue the soldiers in the downed helicopter. While most didn’t know it yet, both pilots had already been killed in the crash and a couple other soldiers were badly wounded. The remaining two soldiers inside set up to defend their ground until help came.

Oh, and one of those pilots was who we heard mentioned in the movie when they’re referring to “Wolcott’s bird.” That would be Chief Warrant Officer 3 Clifton Wolcott, one of the pilots of Super Six-One who was killed in the crash.

The line of Humvees we see in the movie were tasked with making their way to Super Six-One, while one of the smaller helicopters we saw in the movie, an MH-6 Little Bird, went to cover the crash site until the ground forces could get there.

But that posed a logistical problem because even though the helicopter crashed about 300 yards from the target building, the forces on the ground couldn’t see that. So, they asked for help from the helicopters still in the air and slowly made their way in the direction of the crash site.

Another Black Hawk designated Super Six-Eight was sent to the crash site. While the rescue team was rappelling from Super Six-Eight, that helicopter was also hit by an RPG. It didn’t crash, thankfully, but it was forced to return to base.

Another Black Hawk, Super Six-Four, went to the crash site to help both support the soldiers on the ground while also giving a visual indicator to the troops trying to find the crash site from below.

Things went from bad to worse when, at 4:40 PM, Super Six-Four was hit by an RPG, sending it crashing down into some buildings below.

There were now two crashed Black Hawk helicopters. It was the start of what would be a 15-hour rescue mission that would leave 80 American soldiers wounded, 18 American soldiers dead and an estimated 1,000 or more Somali fighters killed.

As you can tell, there’s a lot more to the story of what happened on October 3^rd and 4^th, so if you want to take a deep dive into the true story, scroll back to episode #105 of Based on a True Story where we covered the movie Black Hawk Down.

If you just want to watch the movie, of course, we started our segment about 43 minutes into the movie, but really, pretty much the entire movie takes place this week in history.

Historical birthdays from the movies

This week there are two historical birthdays on Wednesday!

Starting with Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, who was born on October 2^nd, 1847, in the city of Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia—today that’s in Poland.

Paul von Hindenburg was remembered in history as the man who led the Imperial German Army during World War I and then became the President of Germany who proposed Adolf Hitler become the chancellor. Hindenburg remained the President until his death when Hitler dissolved the office of the president so that he could take those powers, too. Because of his association with World War I and Hitler, Von Hindenburg has been portrayed in a lot of movies and TV shows, but if you haven’t seen it yet then I’d recommend the two-part TV miniseries called Hitler: The Rise of Evil. In that series, Von Hindenburg is played by the great actor Peter O’Toole.

Or if you want something more focused on entertainment and not quite as historically accurate, Hindenburg is played by Rainer Bock in the 2017 Wonder Woman movie.

Also on October 2^nd but in the year 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar, India. Better known as Mahatma Ghandi, he was born in British-controlled India and was a lawyer and activist who was influential in leading India toward a peaceful independence from British rule. Probably the most popular movie portraying Ghandi’s life is the 1982 film from Richard Attenborough simply called Ghandi where he was played by Ben Kingsley.

On October 5^th, 1902, Ray Kroc was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Ray was best known as the businessman who bought a fast-food company from the McDonald brothers in 1961 and turned it into the McDonald’s brand we all know today. That story was told in the 2016 movie called The Founder where Ray Kroc is played by Michael Keaton. We compared that movie with history back on episode #90 of Based on a True Story.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

Tuesday this week marks the 14^th anniversary of David Fincher’s biographical drama about the founding of Facebook. In The Social Network, we follow Jesse Eisenberg’s character of Mark Zuckerberg as he’s a Harvard University student back in 2003.

According to the movie, he’s dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara, and in response to the breakup he creates a website called “FaceMash.” That website basically lets Harvard students compare and rank the attractiveness of female students, and it’s an instant hit—so much so that it lands Zuckerberg in trouble with the university administration.

Inspired by the success of “FaceMash,” Zuckerberg decides to create a social networking site for Harvard students, which he calls “The Facebook.”

Meanwhile, we meet two other students named Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The identical twins are both played by Armie Hammer in the movie, and they approach Zuckerberg with an idea for their social networking site, “Harvard Connection.” Zuckerberg agrees to help them but instead uses their concept as a foundation for his own project.

“The Facebook” quickly expands to other Ivy League schools and eventually spreads to universities across the country. Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, is Zuckerberg’s best friend and co-founder of Facebook. He serves as the company’s CFO, providing the initial funding for the venture. However, tensions arise between the two as the platform grows in popularity.

Sean Parker, portrayed by Justin Timberlake, enters the picture as the co-founder of Napster and becomes involved with Facebook. Parker convinces Zuckerberg to relocate the company to Silicon Valley and pursue aggressive expansion, leading to a rift between Zuckerberg and Saverin. Eventually, Saverin’s shares in the company are diluted, and he is effectively pushed out of the business.

The film is framed by two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg. The first is from the Winklevoss twins, who claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea. The second is from Saverin, who sues Zuckerberg for diluting his shares in the company. These legal proceedings are interspersed with flashbacks to the creation and rise of Facebook.

As the lawsuits are settled, the film concludes with Zuckerberg alone, refreshing his Facebook page while awaiting a friend request acceptance from his ex-girlfriend Erica. The movie ends with text stating the outcomes of the lawsuits: the Winklevoss twins received a settlement of $65 million, and Saverin’s name was restored to the list of Facebook’s founders.

The true story behind The Social Network

So, that’s all from the movie’s version of events.

Shifting from the fiction and into the fact-checking, I’m sure you already know who Mark Zuckerberg is, and maybe you’ve heard of the Winklevoss twins. Erica Albright, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker…those are all real people, too, and the movie does a pretty good job of setting up who they are in the true story.

The movie is also correct to show Mark Zuckerberg setting up a website called “FaceMash” that was basically comparing two women side-by-side and letting users vote on which one was more attractive. While the movie doesn’t really focus on this, in the true story Mark Zuckerberg based his “FaceMash” website that he built in 2003 on a website from 2000 called “Hot or Not” that, well, is pretty self-explanatory on what it did.

While Tinder didn’t come around until 2012, a lot of people have compared that style of swiping left or right as the same as concept. Except, of course, Zuckerberg’s “FaceMash” website only included voting for women.

To get photos of students for his own website, Zuckerberg hacked into the Harvard student directories. Those directories were called “facebooks” – so you can get a sense of where the name came from. You can also get an idea for how happy students were when they found out their photos were on FaceMash without their permission. He launched FaceMash on October 28^th, 2003, and the movie is correct to show that almost immediately it was both very popular—and also something that Zuckerberg got into huge trouble over.

After all, he had used photos without permission and used them to objectify women without their consent. People considered it both a violation legal copyright infringement, as well as just being ethically immoral.

Zuckerberg managed to avoid getting expelled, and shut down FaceMash after just three days.

In the movie, we see the lesson Zuckerberg learned from this was to find a way to get people to give their photos and information for free. That’s where, according to the movie, the Winklevoss twins’ idea of “The Harvard Connection” comes in.

And that’s basically correct, because as Zuckerberg was facing the repercussions of FaceMash, enter the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, along with another student named Divya Narendra. He’s played by Max Minghella in the movie.

And it is true that those three worked on a new networking website they called “The Harvard Connection” back in late 2002, and into 2003. When Zuckerberg’s whole FaceMash debacle made him a name on campus, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins asked Zuckerberg if he’d join their project as the lead developer for “The Harvard Connection.”

The idea they had for “The Harvard Connection” was basically to be a social networking platform online for Harvard students—with an eventual plan to grow beyond Harvard—it was eventually renamed “ConnectU.”

So, that’s how Mark Zuckerberg got involved in what was then The Harvard Connection. At the same time as he was helping them, he also recognized the idea of a social networking platform was the perfect way to get people to upload their information into his own platform—the next “FaceMash,” so to speak.

And so it was that, on February 4^th, 2004, Zuckerberg launched a new website he called “The Facebook” after Harvard’s internal directories. This time, though, he wasn’t hacking the directories to get information. He allowed users to upload their information to share with others. And so, the concept of what we know as Facebook now was born.

The Facebook started getting popular fast—and the movie is also correct to show that the Winklevoss twins and Narendra were not happy when they found out about Zuckerberg’s new website. After all, it was basically what they were wanting to do! On top of that, they also felt like Zuckerberg was slacking on developing their platform while working on his own competitor.

We see that in the movie, but to get a better understanding, it’s helpful to know the timeline of it all.

So, if you recall, it was at the end of October in 2003 that FaceMash was shut down. In November of 2003, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins asked Zuckerberg to help with their project. He agreed. Then, on February 4^th, 2004, Zuckerberg launched The Facebook on his own while still developing The Harvard Connection. It took a few months, but as The Facebook got more popular, around May of 2004, the rest of The Harvard Connection team found out about The Facebook.

Well, I guess technically by then they had rebranded from The Harvard Connection to ConnectU in the hopes of expanding beyond Harvard.

In September of 2004, ConnectU officially filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg claiming he stole their ideas to start Facebook. In return, Facebook filed a lawsuit against ConnectU in 2005 claiming they stole Facebook’s web design for ConnectU.

As you can imagine, the lawsuits didn’t make either side happy for quite some time…until, in 2008, they finally agreed on a settlement that saw Facebook handing over about $20 million in cash as well as over a million Facebook shares—another $45 million or so in valuation at the time.

At the time of the settlement in 2008, Facebook was worth about $15 billion dollars, thanks in no small part to an October 2007 investment from Microsoft of about $240 million for 1.6% of Facebook.

Oh! And I didn’t even mention Justin Timberlake’s character, Sean Parker.

It is true that Sean Parker was the very first president of Facebook.

It’s also true that he’s the same guy who founded Napster, although the movie focuses more on Facebook so it doesn’t really tell that part of the story.

In a nutshell, the true story for Sean Parker’s involvement started years earlier back around the turn of the century in 1999 when Parker and his partner Shawn Fanning launched the file-sharing service they called Napster—named after Fanning’s high-school nickname. Both Parker and Fanning were still teenagers when they launched Napster, after all. And that gives you a little insight into Sean Parker, because he didn’t go to Harvard like Mark Zuckerberg did.

In fact, Sean Parker never went to any college. At 16, he won a tech fair by developing a web browser. That was back in 1995, and Netscape Navigator launched in 1994, so the idea of a web browser was still new at the time—and that win earned him an internship at a company called FreeLoader. That was the first company started by Mark Pincus, who you might know as the guy who started Zynga. You remember FarmVille and Words with Friends?

So, that’s who Sean Parker worked for throughout high school. As Sean said in an interview for Forbes, “I wasn’t going to school. I was technically in a co-op program but in truth was just going to work.”

He also said he made about $80,000 that year which, adjusted for inflation, is about the same as $150,000 today. So, his parents were okay with him not going to college.

And that’s what he was doing when he met Shawn Fanning on a dial-up bulletin board. Together, the two built and launched Napster in June of 1999. It gained popularity to help infuse them with some investment money, but they also started to run into legal troubles. That part of the story comes from the band Metallica. They had a song called “I Disappear” on the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack that showed up on Napster before it was officially released.

In April of 2000, they officially filed a lawsuit against Napster, followed soon by other musicians like Dr. Dre as well as the RIAA overall.

The tricky part to all this, though, is the way Napster worked isn’t by hosting the files themselves. If you’re familiar with BitTorrent, that’s a technology that came out in the wake of Napster and works basically the same way. When you installed Napster, it’d scan your hard drive for any MP3 files—technically you could do more than just MP3s as Napster’s software evolved, but MP3s and music was its focus. So, it’d scan for MP3s and create an index of the files you had on your computer. Then, someone else could request that file and Napster would transfer it from your computer to theirs.

The concept is called peer-to-peer, and what that meant is that Napster didn’t actually store the files themselves. So, when they were hit with lawsuits to remove all the copyrighted files—they couldn’t really do that. Napster was forced to cease operations in 2001 and filed for bankruptcy in 2002.

Of course, as is often the case for tech companies, other companies buy up their assets and branding. So, as a little side note, if you look up Napster today—it still exists, or maybe it’s better to say it exists again, because it’s a completely legal streaming service now.

So, in 2002, Parker started up a new company called Plaxo. It was basically a souped-up address book in Microsoft Outlook, but at the time it was also a precursor to social networking. Parker was forced out of Plaxo by investors in 2004, so when he saw “The Facebook” as it was called then on his girlfriend’s computer while she was a student at Stanford and immediately saw the potential.

Thanks to Sean’s past with Napster, he had connections with investors and helped bring on Peter Thiel as one of the first outside investors for Facebook. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk, which he was also the CEO of until they sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

So, around 2004, Thiel was flush with cash and invested $500,000 for about 10.2% of the company. He sold all those shares in 2012 for about $1 billion, although he’s still on the board—actually, there’s a Wall Street Journal article from 2019 that I’ll link to in the show notes if you want to read about some of the controversy swirling around him and his pressuring of Facebook not to fact-check political ads.

And I’m sure you’ve seen the aftermath of those decisions as Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in April of 2018 about Facebook’s role in the election.

September 17th, 1925. Mexico City, Mexico.

To find our first event this week, we’ll skip to about eight and a half minutes into the 2002 movie called Frida.

The streets are crowded with people, but the movie is focusing on a young man and woman in the crowd. She gets sidetracked by one of the vendors on the street. He calls to her, “Frida, come on!” Putting his arm around her, the two continue making their way through the crowd on the street. They’re both dressed nicely in what appears to be some sort of a school uniform.

In the next shot, young Frida is running along the sidewalk. “It’s the bus!” She yells as she runs. We can see a bus—but in the 1920s, this bus looks more like a modified truck with room for people to sit in the back—driving along the road. The boy, Alejandro, assures her they’ll catch the next one.

She keeps running, “No, no!” He runs after her as the two run through the street, almost getting hit by a car, running down the bus. A moment later, and it works. They catch up to the bus and climb aboard.

Once on the bus, the two continue the conversation they were having. Frida sits down on a bench. Then, a lady with a baby is there and Frida gives up her seat for them. Alejandro and Frida continue their conversation, talking about something political or apolitical—Alejandro talks about Marx and Hegel, so maybe they’re referring to Karl Marx and Georg Hegel. They both are standing along with others on the bus, holding onto a bar for stability like you’d expect on a bus even today.

Frida doesn’t seem interested in the conversation about Marx and Hegel and gets sidetracked by someone else on the bus and the theater props they’re carrying.

Just then, the bus driver tries to swerve. Through the window of the bus, we can see what looks like a trolley ramming into the side of the bus. The trolley seems to continue pushing the bus until it hits a wall, throwing glass and everyone inside the bus all over the place. The camera fades to black before coming back to show Frida lying there, bloody and obviously badly hurt from the accident.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Frida

What we’re seeing in the movie happened 99 years ago this Tuesday, on September 17^th, 1925. That’s when Frida Kahlo’s life was forever changed in a bus accident that left her severely injured.

Of course, today, we know of Frida as an artist. At the time of the accident, Frida was only 18 years old and art wasn’t what she was wanting to do with her life.

One of the reasons we see the Frida and Alejandro wearing what looks like a school uniform is because the real reason the two schoolmates and friends were in Mexico City that day was because that’s where they went to school. But they lived about an hour away in Coyoacan, so that’s why they were taking the bus each way.

That day seemed like nothing out of the ordinary for the two.

And the movie was also correct to show the crash being the result of a trolley car. It was traveling full speed when the bus turned around the corner and there wasn’t enough time to get out of the way. The trolley slammed into the bus, crushing it and anyone inside against the street corner.

While we don’t really see this happening in the movie, there was a metal rod that ripped through Frida during the crash. Afterward, a nearby pedestrian trying to help people in the crash saw the rod sticking out of Frida and tried to remove it only to cries so loud that Alejandro would later recall no one could hear the ambulance siren because of Frida’s cries.

For months, Frida Kahlo was confined to bed while her body healed. During that timeframe, she turned to art. Her parents put a mirror on her bed so she could paint herself. She started painting more and more, something that helped her cope with the loneliness of being, well, alone in a bed for months on end.

By the time she was able to leave the bed, her life had changed. She was on the path to become an artist known for putting her own personal trauma and pain into her art. That openness was one of the key characteristics of Frida’s artwork, something that was unique at the time as most women artists in the early 20^th century didn’t put their own hardships into their art. Frida’s artwork was the opposite of that. She didn’t hide what was difficult or painful as many women were forced to do. Instead, she put herself on display through her paintings in a very real way, in a way that was groundbreaking at the time and something we remember her for today.

September 19th, 1952. Washington, D.C.

For our next event this week, we’ll jump to about two hours into the 1992 biopic starring Robert Downey, Jr. simply called Chaplin.

We’re in an office with elegant wood furnishings. A United States flag stands in the corner. Behind the desk in the middle of the room is a black, leather chair. It’s empty. There’s a man in a suit carrying a manilla folder who has just entered the office. He notices the chair is empty, so he turns his head to look off camera.

He carefully sets the folder down on the desk before sneaking over to the other side of the office. As he does, we can see the U.S. Capitol building through the windows.

The camera pans over as the man quietly makes his way to the fireplace. Now we can tell why he was sneaking. He’s trying not to wake the man sleeping in his chair by the fireplace. He touches the sleeping man’s hand trying to wake him.

“Sir”, he whispers quietly.

It didn’t work.

The camera cuts to the man’s face now and we can see this is Kevin Dunn’s character, J. Edgar Hoover. The man shakes Hoover’s shoulder now in a slightly more firm attempt to wake him.

“Sir,” he says a little louder than the whisper before.

Hoover’s eyes open slightly.

“Sir,” the man continues, “we just got word. Chaplin’s off to London on vacation.”

Hoover doesn’t move as he ponders this for a moment. Then, slowly, his mouth curls into a smile.

The next scene in the movie is the one that happens this week in history as we can see text on the screen saying it’s New York Harbor, September 1952.

A massive ocean liner is in the harbor. If you imagine what the Titanic looked like with its iconic four funnels, or smokestacks, well this ship looks a lot like that but with three. So, a similar style ocean liner, albeit not as large as Titanic—but still a good-sized ship. Imagine that in front of the New York skyline in 1952, and that’s what this scene looks like.

After a moment, the movie cuts to aboard the ship, though, as Moira Kelly’s version of Oona O’Neill Chaplin rushes down the stairs to find her husband, Charlie Chaplin. She finds him as he’s at the stern of the ship, overlooking the New York skyline, the Statue of Liberty. On the ship a blue flag with the British Union Jack in the corner is flying.

Oona rushes to Charlie. When she gets there, she has a concerned look on her face. He recognizes this immediately and asks what’s wrong. Then, she tells him the news: They’ve thrown you out.

Charlie is confused at first, as she hands him a piece of paper with the news. She explains it to him: They’ve thrown you out of the United States.

The true story behind that scene in the movie Chaplin

Transitioning to our fact-checking segment, and right away I’ll admit the first part that happened in Washington D.C. probably didn’t happen this week in history. But it’s an important part to set up what did happen this week in history when Charlie Chaplin was refused his entry into the United States.

Granted, the way it happened in the movie was dramatized, but the gist is there.

In the movie, the agent telling Hoover that Chaplin has gone to London mentions it as being a vacation. In the true story, Charlie Chaplin went to London to hold the world premiere of his latest movie called Limelight, which was an autobiographical movie in which the character in the movie is an ex-star dealing with the loss of his popularity. Since Charlie was originally from London, that’s where the story in Limelight was set, so that’s where he decided to hold the world premiere for the film.

And, I guess, it is true that Chaplin took his family to London with him so I could definitely see how it could’ve been considered a vacation, so maybe we can give the movie a break on that.

He boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth on September 18^th, 1952. On September 19^th, the U.S. Attorney General James P. McGranery revoked Charlie’s permit for re-entry into the U.S.

This is my own speculation, but the speed which that happened the day after tells me there were people in the government just waiting for him to leave so they could revoke the permit.

In the years since, it’s been suggested the U.S. government didn’t have much of a case against Chaplin and he probably could’ve been allowed back into the U.S. had he applied. But, when Charlie Chaplin got the news, he decided not to return to the U.S. He himself wrote about the event in his autobiography, and while I can’t offer a direct quote here, you can read exactly what he said on page 455 of his autobiography if you’d like. To paraphrase, basically, Chaplin was fed up with the insults and hatred he’d received in America.

The catch was that most of Charlie’s wealth—his film studio, his home, etc. was in the United States. So, it was Oona who returned to the U.S. to settle his affairs. They moved to Switzerland and she renounced her own U.S. citizenship in 1953.

As you can imagine, there’s a lot more to this story…which is why I had a chat with Pulitzer Prize finalist author Scott Eyeman, who has written a number of excellent biographies on film history—including his book called Charlie Chaplin Vs America that digs into the true story of Charlie Chaplin—and of course you’ll find a link to it in the show notes.

September 21st, 1937. England.

Our third event from this week in history can be found in the 2019 biopic called Tolkien, and we’re starting about an hour and 43 minutes into the movie, we’re outside with trees in the background and dead leaves covering the ground. A man and woman are walking together with some kids. The man asks the kids if they’ll do something for him. He asks them to listen to a story.

“Is it a good story?” One of the kids asks in a blunt way that kids do so well.

“I hope so,” he says.

“Is it long?”

“Extremely long.”

They go on to ask more questions about his story. Has it been started? What’s it about?

He says it’s been started in his mind. It’s about journeys, adventures, magic, treasure, and love. All things, really. All the kids are looking at him now.

He says the story is about the journeys we take to prove ourselves. It’s about fellowship. He points to one of the little boys and says it’s about little people just like you. The child retorts that he’s not little, and the man quickly corrects himself. No. Little in stature, not little in spirit.

The movie cuts away from the outdoors and we’re not in the woods anymore. We’re inside in a room. The same man from before is sitting, reading some papers. He’s deep in thought.

Then, he turns the paper to a fresh page. Pen in hand, he pauses to think for one more moment before he starts to write. The camera angle doesn’t let us see what he’s writing at first, but after a few seconds, it cuts to a more overhead view of the page. Now, we can see the words he’s written to start the story: “In a hole in the ground, there lived” … he stops writing for a bit and the camera cuts away from the paper to the man’s face. He speaks the word: “Hobbit.”

The true story behind that scene in the movie Tolkien

Okay, so right away I’ll admit that this is another scene that didn’t really happen this week in history. But that’s because the movie doesn’t show the real event that did happen this week, and that scene in the movie is talking about the start of something that ended this week in history…the movie just doesn’t show the ending.

I’m sure you already know by now the man with the story is J.R.R. Tolkien and the story itself is The Hobbit. That scene comes from the 2019 biopic that is simply called Tolkien.

And it shows Tolkien starting to write The Hobbit. What happened this week in history was that The Hobbit was published.

What we don’t see in that sequence in the movie is that J.R.R. Tolkien had been writing stories about the world he created—Middle Earth—for many years at this point, but The Hobbit was his first published work.

There was a BBC documentary in 1968 where Tolkien himself described writing that opening line. I’ll include a link to it in the show notes for this episode if you want to watch it, but basically Tolkien recounts that he was grading his student’s papers in his house at 20 Northmoor Road. He had a pile of exam papers to go through, something he admitted was a boring task.

He picked up one of the papers to review and the student had left one page blank. So, he just grabbed the blank page and wrote down: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

That was then published this week in history on September 21^st, 1937, as The Hobbit. Of course, he’d go on to write The Lord of the Rings and other books, making Tolkien one of the most popular authors of all time. And covering the Tolkien movie as one of the first interviews for Based on a True Story is no mistake, because I’m such a fan of Tolkien’s work…it was one of my great honors to chat with legendary Tolkien scholar John Garth about the Tolkien movie.

Hop in the show notes to find a link for that episode now!

Historical birthdays from the movies

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On September 18^th, 1905, Greta Gustafsson was born in Stockholm, Sweden. She’s better known by her stage name, Greta Garbo, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time. Her story was portrayed in the 1980 movie called The Silent Lovers where she’s played by Kristina Wayborn.

Oh, and as another bonus, Greta Garbo was the actress who played Mata Hari in the classic 1931 film of the same name that we covered on episode #74 of Based on a True Story—so I’ll link that in the show notes.

On September 20^th, 1884, Maxwell Perkins was born in New York City. He was an editor and publisher at Scribner where he oversaw works by esteemed authors like Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few. His story is told in the 2016 movie called Genius where Max is played by Colin Firth. We covered that movie in more depth back on episode #65 of Based on a True Story.

Also on September 20^th, but in 1917, Arnold Jacob Auerbach was born in Brooklyn, New York. He’s best known by his nickname, “Red,” and as the head coach of the Washington Capitols, Tri-Cities Blackhawks, and Boston Celtics, where he set NBA records was one of the most successful coaches in the history of professional sports. He was played by Michael Chiklis in the 2022 TV series from Max called Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

Time now for our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies released this week in history, and this week’s movie has the BOATS text less than a minute into the movie. The very first thing after the opening credits in the movie Goodfellas is text that says, “This film is based on a true story.”

This Wednesday marks the 34^th anniversary of Goodfellas, which hit theaters in the U.S. on September 18^th, 1990.

Directed by Martin Scorsese, Goodfellas is adapted from a book by Nicholas Pileggi called Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. The IMDb description for Goodfellas says it is, “The story of Henry Hill and his life in the mafia, covering his relationship with his wife Karen and his mob partners Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito.”

Henry Hill is played by Ray Liotta, while his wife Karen is played by Lorraine Bracco. Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito are played by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, respectively.

It starts in the 1950s, as a young child, Henry’s mother happened to grow up in the same Italian city as Paulie Cicero, so now that Paulie is a big wig in the Mafia, that’s how Henry grew up around “the life,” as they call it in the movie. So, it’s not a big surprise that Henry starts working for Paulie Cicero when he’s old enough. Paulie is played by Paul Sorvino in the movie.

Also growing up with Henry is Tommy Devito, who is played by Joe Pesci. When Henry and Tommy start helping the Mafia with jobs—they can’t be more than teenagers at the time—the two boys are mentored by Robert De Niro’s character, Jimmy Conway.

As they continue to rise in the Mafia’s ranks, so, too, does their violence. Tommy, in particular, has a short fuse leading to a lot of rage. That rage is on full display in the 1970s when a guy named Billy Batts enters their nightclub. Billy Batts is played by Frank Vincent in the movie.

And according to the movie, Billy Batts is not just any guy, but he’s a made man in the Gambino crime family. He says the wrong thing to Tommy, who starts stabbing Billy Batts.

Killing a made guy without approval from the Mafia’s leadership then, basically, you’re the next to get whacked. To try and avoid that fate, the three associates try to cover up their crime by burying Billy’s body in upstate New York…and then re-bury the body a few months later when they find out the place they buried it was going to have something built on it.

A tip to the FBI ends up sending Henry to prison for about four years, so we see some of his prison time in the movie as well. While he’s in there, he has Karen sneak drugs into the prison so Henry can sell them to another inmate.

When he gets out, Henry joins Tommy for a heist that Jimmy is planning. The target is the Lufthansa vault at JFK International Airport in New York City. And, according to the movie, it’s successful! Ray Liotta’s version of Henry Hill says they got away with $6 million in cash.

But…some of the robbers get a little too excited about their new money and they ignore Jimmy’s order not to make any large purchases. So, after that leads police to find the getaway car they used, Jimmy has everyone killed, except Tommy and Henry.

Violence finally comes to the trio a few years later when Tommy is tricked into thinking he’s going to a ceremony for his becoming a made man. Instead, he’s murdered for his part in killing Billy Batts. That’s in 1979, and no doubt it doesn’t help Henry’s cocaine habit that just continues to get worse—leading to his arrest in 1980 when he tried to buy some drugs from undercover agents.

He gets bailed out by Karen, but the drugs go against Paulie’s orders—he had told Henry not to get into the drug world. So, after he’s bailed out, Paulie gives Henry some cash and then officially cuts ties with Henry.

Henry turns to Jimmy for help, but Jimmy is still in the Mafia and we start to get the sense from the movie that Jimmy is probably going to take out Henry. So, Henry decides to become an informant for the feds. He gives them enough information to take down Jimmy and Paulie, and in exchange the feds put Henry and his family into the Witness Protection Program.

And, according to the text at the end of the movie, that’s where Henry Hill is still at—in the Witness Protection Program, after his arrest in 1987. Paulie died in Fort Worth Federal Prison of a respiratory illness in 1988 at the age of 73. Henry and Karen separated in 1989.

And Jimmy Conway, Robert De Niro’s character, is currently serving a 20-years-to-life sentence for murder and won’t be eligible for parole until 2004.

The true story behind Goodfellas

Well, obviously, it’s after 2004, and now in 2024, those three men are all dead now. But, remember, the movie came out in 1990, and back then two of the three were still alive.

So, that gives us the perfect place to start our fact-checking: The people.

Henry Hill was based on a real person; we’ll learn more about him in a moment. The real Henry Hill died on June 12^th, 2012.

And Lorraine Bracco’s character, Karen, really was Henry Hill’s wife. Karen Hill née Friedman is still alive as of this recording—she’s 76, and the movie is correct that she and Henry divorced in 1989, although it was legally finalized in 2002.

For the other mobsters, the names changed some.

Robert De Niro’s character of Jimmy Conway is based on a real gangster named Jimmy Burke. The real Jimmy Burke died on April 13^th, 1996—so, after the movie was released.

Joe Pesci’s character, Tommy DeVito, is based on another real gangster named Tommy DeSimone. And in the movie, we see Tommy’s death. We don’t really know what happened to the real Tommy DeSimone. He just simply disappeared on January 14^th, 1979.

And Paul Sorvino’s character, Paulie Cicero, is based on Paul Vario, who really was a powerful caporegime in the Lucchese crime family. The movie was correct to say he died in a Fort Worth prison of a respiratory failure as a result of lung cancer on May 3^rd, 1988.

The movie does a pretty good job of capturing how the real Henry Hill got into the Mafia. His dad was an Irish-American, and his mother was of Sicilian descent. The family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn when Henry was just seven years old, and coincidentally Paul Vario had a son about the same age. So, they played together often, and Henry started idolizing the mobsters he saw.

Just like we see in the movie, Henry started working for the mobsters as a teenager. One of them was Jimmy Burke, the guy that Robert De Niro’s character is based on.

So, that’s how Jimmy started to take Henry under his wing, very much like we see in the movie. As for the real Tommy DeSimone, that’s the guy Joe Pesci’s character is based on, he grew up in the same neighborhood as Henry so they became close friends as they rose in the Mafia’s ranks.

That brings us to the event in the movie that changes it all: The murder of Billy Batts. Billy was a real gangster, who really went by the nickname Billy Batts. His real name was William Bentvena.

The movie doesn’t show anything about Billy Batts being in prison, it just shows him getting out and implies he was in there for a while. And in the true story, William Bentvena was in prison for narcotics trafficking—he was caught by undercover police in a drug deal on Valentine’s Day in 1959. Then, three years later, he was convicted and received a sentence of 15 years. He was released in 1970, though, which is why we’re seeing him for the first time in the movie.

And while the way Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito acted out the scene of killing Billy Batts is sped up a little bit, the basic gist gets across with the movie’s version.

This all comes from the book the movie is based on, and according to that book, Henry Hill’s version of the events are just like what we see in the movie. The whole reason for them being at the nightclub owned by Jimmy that night was because of a welcome home party of sorts for Billy. That’s why we see the balloons and streamers decorating the bar in the movie, and I think someone even comes up to Billy to say “Welcome home, Billy,” in the movie too.

At one point in the night, Billy joked to Tommy something about asking if he still shined shoes. Tommy took it as an insult and threatened to kill Billy. Here’s where the movie changed it, though, because in the movie’s version it seems to be later that night when Tommy attacks Billy from behind, before Jimmy joins in.

The true story behind that event might’ve started with an insult about shining shoes that led to Tommy’s threats against Billy Batts, but it was actually two weeks later when Tommy snuck up behind Billy and pistol-whipped him, yelling, “Shine these fucking shoes!”

And the movie shows Jimmy start kicking Billy pretty fast, too, but I couldn’t find anything about it happening that fast in the true story. Henry Hill’s version of the event did see Tommy beat Billy to the point of him being dead…at least, they thought he was. Just like we see in the movie, Billy wasn’t really dead. They started hearing noises from the trunk of the car.

And he was in the trunk of the car because Jimmy Burke was driving his body up to a friend’s dog kennel in upstate New York where he knew he could hide the body. Because the movie is also correct to show that the real Billy Batts was a made man in the Gambino crime family.

Oh, and the movie is also correct to show them having to move the body later. Jimmy’s friend who owned the dog kennel sold it about three months later. So, Jimmy ordered Tommy and Henry to go move the body. We don’t see this happening in the movie, but in the book Henry says they took the body to be crushed in a compactor at a New Jersey junkyard owned by a mob associate.

The real Henry Hill also gave commentary for the movie, which I’d recommend watching, and for that he contradicted his previous statement, though, and said Billy was buried in Jimmy’s nightclub, a place called Robert’s Lounge, until it could be put in the compactor later.

Regardless of which version is true, that was the beginning of the end for the real Tommy DeSimone who was killed in retaliation just like we see in the movie. Although the movie mentions it was only partially for the murder of Billy Batts—and that’s true, because he also killed someone else the movie doesn’t even show.

That’s a guy named Ronald Jerothe. Tommy dated Ronald’s sister and beat her up, which made Ronald understandably angry and he said he was going to kill Tommy. But, Tommy overheard this, and killed Ronald first.

Here’s the connection: Both Billy Batts and Ronald Jerothe reported to the same guy in the Gambino crime family: A man named John Gotti, maybe you’ve heard of him. He turned out to be quite infamous as well.

So, Tommy committed the murder of Ronald Jerothe, and on top of that it came out that Tommy had committed another unsanctioned murder of Billy Batts?

You see where this is headed. Thomas DeSimone was reported missing on January 14^th, 1979, by his wife, Angela. So, if you see that as the date of Tommy’s death, that’s why…but we don’t really know if he died that day because when Angela reported him missing, she said she last saw him a couple weeks earlier.

At least, that’s how the story goes…but the true story? Well, as you can imagine, when we’re talking about the world of organized crime, we just don’t know a lot of things.

So, for a lot of these events —for a lot of things, that’s all we have to rely on: The word of someone who was there.

Even the things I’ve talked about today, we know most of that thanks to the book the movie is based on as well as a book Henry Hill wrote himself later called Gangsters and Goodfellas.

Actually…do you want to hear more Mafia stories from someone who was there?

On episode #286, I had a chat with Scott Hoffman, whose dad was a part of the Chicago Outfit and actually worked for the real Henry Hill as a kid himself! We talked about how the Mafia is portrayed in movies like Goodfellas, and other gangster movies like Casino, Donnie Brasco, and The Sopranos!

September 2nd, 31 BCE. Mediterranean Sea.

Our first event comes from the HBO miniseries about ancient Rome that is simply called Rome, and to find the event from this week in history we’ll have to skip to the start of the very end—almost of the whole series. In other words, the very beginning of episode 10 in season two, which is the series finale.

You’ll know you’re at the right spot when there’s no land as far as the eye can see. There’s only water. In the foreground, a single rowboat is floating on the choppy waters. I counted ten people inside, although the camera is too far away to see any faces. The focus of the scene, though, is in the distance on the horizon.

That’s where we can see scores of ships, some closer, some further away—and almost all of them are ablaze. Huge plumes of smoke are rising into the sky, casting almost an orange glow above the waters. A ball of flame shoots through the smoke and explodes on one of the ships.

The camera then cuts to the rowboat, where we can see James Purefoy’s version of Mark Antony looking down at the water with a defeated look on his face.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Rome

That was a very quick scene, because the series goes on to wrap up the storyline in the aftermath of the battle in the final episode of the series, but the event it’s showing there is the Battle of Actium.

The show is correct to show Mark Antony looking rather defeated because he was on the losing end of what would be a decisive victory for Octavian.

Octavian and Mark Antony had been at odds with each other…well, pretty much since the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. We learned more about that back in episode #308 during the Ides of March. For a while after that, Octavian and Antony were allied as they tracked down Caesar’s assassins along with some other well-known historical figures such as Cleopatra.

Once they took care of the assassins, the rivalry between Octavian and Antony grew into a resentment that culminated in the Battle of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra had about 500 ships and 70,000 infantry while Octavian had 400 ships and 80,000 infantry. Despite large numbers of troops, the battle took place in the sea. After some intense fighting, Cleopatra fled with her Egyptian ships and Antony broke off the attack to follow her. The rest of Antony’s ships surrendered to Octavian. About a week later, Antony’s troops on land surrendered as well.

It was a decisive win for Octavian, who would later be known as Caesar Augustus, and cement him as the undisputed master of the Roman world.

If you want to watch the brief segment we talked about today, check out the HBO miniseries called Rome and we see the ships and Antony’s defeat happening at the beginning of the final episode in the whole series.

September 4th, 1886. Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.

Our next historical event comes from Geronimo: An American Legend, and we’ll have to fast forward to about an hour and 40 minutes into the movie to reveal a beautiful landscape of a desert canyon. Not a single person can be seen, but it doesn’t take long for Matt Damon’s voiceover to tell us the date of September 4^th, 1886, as well as the significance of the date.

Damon’s character in the movie, 2^nd Lt. Britton Davis, says that’s the date that Geronimo and 34 Chiricahua men, women, and children surrendered to General Nelson Miles.

The scene in the movie changes to Kevin Tighe’s character, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, riding a horse in front of those men, women, and children walking by foot along the canyon.

We can see some other U.S. soldiers in uniform riding horses in the background, too, but the camera’s focus is on Miles.

The voiceover continues, saying that as Geronimo handed over his weapons, he simply said, “Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender, and that is all.”

One of the soldiers there is 2^nd Lt. Davis—a very young Matt Damon.

The camera cuts to another scene of this whole column of men, women, and children walking by foot alongside the soldiers on horseback.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Geronimo: An American Legend

Another quick segment as far as the movie is concerned, but the movie is correct to give us the date of September 4^th, 1886, as being when Geronimo surrendered for the final time—he had actually surrendered multiple times before, but life on a reservation wasn’t kind to those who were used to a nomadic lifestyle like the Apache people were.

That quote is something often attributed to Geronimo, too:

“Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”

What’s tricky about verifying the quote, or really many things about the nature of Geronimo’s actual surrender is that his story of what happened and the story of what happened from the U.S. soldiers who accepted his surrender are different.

According to the U.S. Army’s account, Geronimo’s surrender was unconditional. Not so, according to Geronimo’s own memoirs. He insisted to his dying day that he and his people had been misled and the surrender was conditional.

Maybe that’s why the movie doesn’t show the actual surrender itself but describe it through voiceover.

But, the movie was also correct to mention Geronimo’s weapons in that voiceover. He had three weapons on him at the time of surrender: A Winchester rifle, a Colt pistol, and a Bowie knife.

Today, the rifle is on display at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, while the pistol and knife are at a museum in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—where Geronimo died in 1909, decades after his surrender.

If you want to watch the scene from the movie we talked about this week, you’ll find where it’s currently streaming in the show notes.

September 7th, 1876. Northfield, Minnesota.

For our third event this week, we’ll go to the heist movie from 1972 called The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid. About an hour and two minutes into the movie, we can see a water trough in the foreground of the shot is filled almost to the top. There’s a carriage just on the other side of it, and in the background, we can see buildings along the road.

Picture if you will: A typical Western town from a 1970s movie—and this is basically what that looks like.

Except when I think of towns in Western movies, I think of a dirt road being all dusty in the heat of the sun. This one is muddy because it’s raining out. Someone carrying an umbrella races along the road as they try to keep from getting wet.

A couple women rush along the sidewalk, too, seemingly trying to stay dry. Not everyone cares about the rain, though, as we can see a man on a horse meandering slowly along the road. The camera focuses in on him as he continues along the road and now we can start to see some of the signs for buildings along the way.

The signs for the stores are very self-explanatory: That one just says “Furniture” and next to it is “Manning’s Stoves & Hardware.”

There’s not much of a surprise about what you’ll be able to get there.

The camera shifts focus now and instead of following the lone rider on the horse, it cuts to three men on horses coming the other direction. Oh, there’s more than three—there’s another guy who seems to be a part of the same crew.

It looks like it’s raining harder now, too, as the camera angle changes. The four men get off their horses and as they’re moving, we can see at least one of them has a rifle. They walk up to the sidewalk, looking around as if they’re seeing who is noticing them arrive. No one else seems to notice…or, at least, if they do it’s not apparent from the movie.

Inside one of the buildings, there’s a man writing something down. There’s a noise behind him, and he turns around just in time to get hit over the head with a shovel. He slumps over, unconscious. The window blinds are closed so no one from the outside can see what’s about to happen inside.

The other guys in the crew who were still outside in the rain calmly walk inside, and we can see there’s a sign on the outside that says this is a bank. More violence ensues as the men force the workers inside to, as one of the men says, “make a withdrawal.”

Except…I don’t think this is a legitimate withdrawal since it’s happening at gunpoint.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid

Time for the fact-check!

What we just saw in the movie…or, rather, what I just described to you as I’m watching the movie, is an event from this week in history when the James-Younger Gang participated in what many have called one of their most infamous holdups.

As the name of the movie says straight up, this raid really did happen in the town of Northfield, Minnesota. Well, the movie calls it a raid. It was a bank robbery. For a bit of geographical context, Northfield, Minnesota is about 36 miles, or 58 kilometers, to the south of Minneapolis.

And the First National Bank of Northfield had about $15,000 in its safe at the time. In 1876, that’s about the same as $423,000 today.

And while the segment of the movie we just heard described doesn’t give any indication about who is who, in the true story, one of the reasons why the robbery at the Northfield bank has gone down in history is because it was the beginning of the end for the notorious outlaw Jesse James.

The James-Younger Gang got their name from two sets of brothers: Frank and Jesse James as well as Cole and Bob Younger. They weren’t the only ones in the gang, of course, but they were the leaders and generally considered the most notorious of the outlaws.

Around 2 o’clock in the afternoon on September 7^th, 1876, the James-Younger gang rode into Northfield, Minnesota with a plan to rob the bank. I couldn’t find anything to suggest it was raining like we see in the movie, but the weather didn’t really matter for the plans.

Three members of the gang took up position down the street near a bridge as lookouts. Two more stayed outside the bank. Frank James, Bob Younger, and another of the gang, Charlie Pitts, were the members of the gang to enter the bank. While it didn’t necessarily happen exactly like we see in the movie with the shovel knocking one of the men unconscious, the robbers did demand the bank employees open the safe.

One thing the movie got wrong was how the town was alerted to the bank being robbed. We didn’t talk about this in the scene of the film we covered, but a little bit later there’s someone outside the bank who gets shot by someone in the gang. That is what makes everyone get alerted to what’s going on.

In the true story, it should have been included in the segment we talked about earlier because there was someone leaving the bank right as some of the gang went in to rob it. That person, a man named J.S. Allen, recognized the bank was being robbed almost immediately. He didn’t know who the robbers were, but he knew what was happening and he called out for help. Some townspeople nearby heard the call for help and grabbed their guns to investigate the bank.

The robbers outside the bank guarding the door didn’t help with the curiosity of the armed townspeople investigating.

A shootout started.

In the chaos, two of the James-Younger Gang were killed and left behind as they fled with only about $26.70 instead of the $15,000 in the safe.

A militia was formed to find the gang that had just tried to rob the bank. When they caught up to them, Charlie Pitts was killed by the militia in a shootout that saw the Younger Brothers captured. The only ones to get away from the attempted robbery at the Northfield bank was Jesse and Frank James, who had split off from the rest of the gang to flee back home to Missouri.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history as it’s depicted on screen, check out the 1972 film called The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.

The gang rides into town to start the bank robbery sequence at about an hour and two minutes into the film.

And while we don’t have an episode covering that movie, if you want to learn more about the true story I’ll include a link in the show notes for this episode to a fantastic article from the Minnesota Digital Library that includes photographs of the places and people involved.

August 19th, 1692. Salem, Massachusetts.

For our first movie, we’re traveling back to the time of the Salem Witch Trials from The Crucible, that 1996 film with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. To find the event from this week in history in the film, we’ll need to start at about an hour and 50 minutes into the movie.

“Now, Mr. Proctor. Did you bind yourself to the devil’s service?”

Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, John Proctor, is standing there across from Paul Scofield’s character, Judge Thomas Danforth.

Judge Danforth tells John that he must write it down so they can put it on the church door as a good example to bring them to God.

There are two women in a cart behind Judge Danforth, but he’s not looking at them. He looks at John and Elizabeth Proctor standing in front of him. Danforth is only talking to John, though.

He asks the question again.

“Did you bind yourself to the devil’s service?”

John pauses for a moment. Then he offers his reply, “I did.”

Judge Danforth turns to the women in the cart now, saying there’s no point in keeping the conspiracy. Confess with him!

Elizabeth Lawrence’s version of Rebecca Nurse is tied to the cart behind Judge Danforth. She bursts out, “It is a lie!”

Judge Danforth asks if John Proctor saw anyone else with the devil—Rebecca Nurse, Mary Easty, Giles Corey, Martha Corey?

John says no, he did not.

Anyone?

John: No, I did not.

Others around Judge Danforth tell him to let John sign and be done with it!

A moment’s pause. Then, a quill is handed to John Proctor. He looks at a piece of paper…and signs his name.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Crucible

That’s just the start of the whole sequence that that continues on—but it’s showing something that happened this week in history when five people were hung in what we now know as the Salem Witch Trials.

Although the movie’s portrayal of events are highly dramatized, it is correct to show that John Proctor—Daniel Day-Lewis’ character—was someone who was killed by hanging this week in history on August 19^th, 1692.

He was one of 19 total people who were executed by hanging throughout the duration of the witch trials that took place between February of 1692 and May of 1693.

Almost all of the accusations were circumstantial at best, and nothing that would hold up in a court of law today. There are a lot of people who think the true motivation started off small and innocent before spreading into landowners realizing they could take advantage of it to legally take the land and possessions of their neighbors.

Is that what really happened? Well, I guess that’s something that keeps the Salem Witch Trials at the forefront of our curiosities because there are so many debates about the true causes and motivations behind what happened.

Regardless of any of the circumstantial evidence, the baseless accusations or the religious fever that gripped the region—at the end of the day, there were over 200 people accused of witchcraft. 30 were found guilty. 19 people were executed by hanging, five people died in jail as a result and one man, Giles Corey, was tortured to death by being pressed—the slow process of adding stones on top of him until he was killed.

This all happened in the United States thanks to religious people who were so set in their ways that they were okay with killing their own neighbors simply because someone accused them of witchcraft.

When, in reality, those accusations have been analyzed over the centuries and there have been numerous explanations—and no matter what outcome you believe, at the end of the day, everyone can agree that there was no valid reason for the hysteria to kill their neighbors.

If you want to see the event that happened this week in history, though, look in the show notes for links to where you can watch The Crucible as well as listen to our deep dive into the historical accuracy of that movie back on episode #143 of Based on a True Story.

August 21st, 1961. Nashville, Tennessee.

For our next movie, we’re in the 1985 biopic called Sweet Dreams to see how it portrays Patsy Cline recording her now-famous song called “Crazy” in the studio. At about an hour and 21 minutes into the movie, we’re in the recording studio with four men and one woman. Almost immediately, there’s an oddity as the woman is holding herself up with a crutch.

No one is playing their instruments, but we can hear music playing…it must be something playing over the speakers in the studio. She hobbles over to the pianist, who is busy jotting down some notes.

She rests her crutch on the piano as the man keeps singing the song in the background, “I’m crazy for feeling so blue…”

She waves to the guys in the sound booth to cut the song.

She shakes her head.

“I don’t care how many times you play that; I can’t sing this man’s song.”

One of the men in the sound booth replies that no one wants her to—take it away from him. The pianist closest to her reaffirms this. To hell with the demo, steal it!

Cigarette in hand, she shakes her head again. “How am I supposed to do this song?”

The man in the studio replies, “Just like you always do, Patsy—your way!”

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Sweet Dreams

I’ll be the first to admit the movie’s version may not make a lot of sense without watching the rest of it, but that short segment is how 1985’s Sweet Dreams depicts when Patsy Cline recorded her now-famous song “Crazy” in the studio.

That man on the demo? Another singer who was famous in his own right: Willie Nelson.

Of course, at the time, Nelson wasn’t famous. Quite the opposite. According to Nelson’s autobiography, part of the idea that inspired him to write the song “Crazy” had to do with how he felt during a time of his life when he was trying to support his family with unstable work.

In the movie, while Jessica Lange’s version of Patsy Cline is recording the song we hear her talking to one of the men in the control room named Bradley.

He’s played by Jerry Haynes in the movie, and there is a level of historical accuracy there because Owen Bradley really was Patsy Cline’s producer. In fact, it was Bradley who suggested the song for Patsy Cline after he heard it from one of Willie Nelson’s friends and colleagues, another song writer named Hank Cochran.

He’s not in the movie at all, but then again neither is Willie Nelson.

Patsy Cline recorded her version of “Crazy” starting on August 24^th, 1961, and the recording process took about a month: It wrapped up on September 15^th. Then, it was released in October of the same year, and it was an immediate hit.

Since Patsy Cline had just released another hit single earlier in the year called “I Fall Into Pieces,” after “Crazy” was released to such success, Billboard named Patsy Cline their Favorite Female Country Artist of 1961.

If you want to watch the recording process as it’s portrayed in the movie, check out the 1985 biopic about Patsy Cline’s life called Sweet Dreams. The recording of “Crazy” starts at about an hour and 21 minutes into the film.

And if you want to dig into Patsy’s life and tragic death just two years after the recording of “Crazy”, we covered that movie back in episode #95 which you’ll find linked in the show notes.

August 24th, 79 CE. Italy.

Our third event comes from ancient history, and a ten-year-old movie that’s named after the city it takes place in: Pompeii. We’ll start about an hour and six minutes into the movie as two men are sword fighting in an arena. While this part of the movie doesn’t tell us who they are, we can tell from the actors that the two men are played by Sasha Roiz’s character, Proculus, and Kit Harington’s character, Milo.

The sword fighting intensifies and every so often we can hear the crowd cheering as one of the two men gets a hit in on the other.

The camera cuts to Kiefer Sutherland’s character, Corvus, as he’s watching…all of a sudden, the building starts to rumble. Corvus looks around, trying to figure out what’s going on.

In the arena, Proculus knocks Milo down to the ground before he realizes everything is shaking. The cheers of the crowd change into screams as people start looking around at each other. We can hear the sound of cracking, although there doesn’t seem to be any visual damage yet.

Oh wait, I spoke too soon.

The camera pans up from the ground level of the arena and we can see pieces of the whole building start to collapse into piles of dust and debris. People are fleeing for the exits. The camera keeps panning up and in the distance behind the arena is a massive mountain. At the top of the mountain, there’s a burst as scores of smoke and ash spew into the sky.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Pompeii

Shifting to our fact-checking portion of the segment, it is true that Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24^th in the year 79 CE.

Well, maybe.

And the movie’s version of the story isn’t anything like what happened. For example, the characters are fictional, so of course their storyline is going to be fictional. But, the true story is one that we still don’t know fully, so the movie isn’t really trying to be more than transporting us to Pompeii to see how things might have happened for people who were there.

Because the truth is that we don’t know exactly what it was like. After all, it was almost 2,000 years ago.

1,945 years, as of this recording in 2024.

With that said, although the movie’s timeline focuses on the eruption in 79 CE, that’s not really where the true story begins.

There was a massive earthquake about 16 years earlier, in 63 CE, that caused a lot of damage to many of the buildings near Vesuvius. Today, most scientists and historians believe the earthquake was a bit of a warning sign. But, it’s not likely the local residents knew it to be a warning sign of something worse to come, and Romans loved the beautiful views along the shores of the Bay of Naples that Pompeii provided.

By the time the year 79 CE rolled around, there was around 20,000 people who lived in Pompeii. And while it doesn’t get as much attention, there was another town nearby called Herculaneum.

As a fun little fact, Herculaneum was actually rediscovered before Pompeii—in 1709, while Pompeii was discovered decades later in 1748.

Herculaneum was a smaller town with only about 5,000 residents at the time of the eruption, but most believe it was a vacation town for Roman elites and, by extension, a wealthier town than Pompeii.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve heard of Pompeii more, because there were a lot less human remains found in Herculaneum than Pompeii. Is that simply because there were fewer people in Herculaneum? Maybe.

Or maybe it’s because, even today, most of Herculaneum has yet to be uncovered—you see, part of the city lies underneath the modern-day city of Ercolano.

Or maybe it’s because Herculaneum consisted of more Roman elites than Pompeii, so they were able to flee while leaving less fortunate people behind.

Those are all speculations that people have had over the centuries but, of course, they’re purely speculation.

What’s not speculation is that Vesuvius’ eruption killed about 16,000 people in the region, with 2,000 of them being in Pompeii. And I’m sure you’ve seen photos of Pompeii—the manner in which many people who were killed by the ash tells a unique story in history, even if the destruction of an erupting volcano is not.

I’ll add a link to some in the show notes for this episode if you want to see them.

Men, women, and children were preserved the way they were that day—clutching valuables or arms wrapped around their loved ones.

The way the ash preserved the city is almost as if it was frozen in time. Approximately 2,000 of Pompeii’s residents never left, only to be rediscovered in 1748.

But, since we’re talking about the movie, there is one vitally important thing the filmmakers got wrong that you should know whenever you watch it.

And, to be fair, it’s not their fault they got it wrong.

You see, for almost that entire time, historians believed the date of the eruption took place this week in history. That’s because one of the people who survived was Pliny the Younger. He was only 17 at the time of the eruption, and although the uncle he lived with, Pliny the Elder, was one of the people killed at Pompeii, Pliny the Younger would go on to be an author whose writings have given us a lot of knowledge about what Roman life was like back then.

So, when Pliny gave us the date of the eruption as being August 24^th and 25^th. Since there was no archaeological finds to dispute that, there was no reason to question it.

That was true for centuries throughout history even up through the time of the movie because it wasn’t until 2018 that an archaeological find at Pompeii changed all of that.

It was a date.

Someone found the date of October 17^th inscribed at Pompeii.

Even more archaeological evidence found in 2018 included some fruits still on branches from autumn-bearing fruits. Of course, the movie was released in 2014, so the filmmakers were still operating under the belief that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place this week in history.

So, that’s why I thought this would still be a great movie to cover this week because if nothing else, the 2014 movie Pompeii is just another great example of how we’re always learning new things about history every day.

Or, to quote Italy’s culture minister, Alberto Bonisoli, after the date in October was found, and the fruits from autumn seemed to back up the evidence that Pompeii was still around in the beginning of October, he said: “Today, with much humility, perhaps we will rewrite the history books because we date the eruption to the second half of October.”

August 5th, 1305. Scotland.

We’ll start with one of the most popular of those ‘based on a true story’ movies, Braveheart, to learn about an event in history that happened 719 years today: William Wallace’s capture. About two and a half hours into the movie, we see Mel Gibson’s version of William Wallace is riding a horse into a village. Besides the castle, which seems to be a small castle—but a castle nonetheless—the rest of the village seems to be made of wood houses with straw roofs. A few villagers are scattered around, going about their daily business.

Inside the castle, Angus Macfadyen’s version of Robert the Bruce is pacing on top of a table when Wallace’s presence is announced. Robert turns and hops off the table. Following him outside is Craig, who is played by John Kavanagh in the movie.

Outside, we see Wallace still on his horse, passing by the castle’s open gate. Robert and Craig start descending the stairs from the castle, and Robert raises his hand to greet him. Wallace responds with a wave.

Robert and Craig continue walking down the stairs as Wallace starts to get off his horse. Hopping to the ground, someone leads the horse away just as Robert and Craig reach the bottom of the castle stairs. Then, the music in the movie reaches a moment of pause…

In the castle courtyard, Robert and Wallace are walking toward each other. The young boy leading the horse looks away suspiciously. Wallace notices this and he looks to the side. Robert notices it, too, and he turns to look at Craig. For his part, Craig looks as if he’s about to signal someone with a slight nod.

Wallace’s head turns back to Robert who yells out, “No!”

Just then, a rush of armed soldiers tackle William Wallace, knocking him to the ground. At least five or six soldiers are hitting him with their wooden clubs, not to kill him but to beat him into submission. Robert rushes forward, trying to push the soldiers off. “You lied! You lied!”

The soldiers start beating him, too. Craig rushes in, pulling Robert aside. As he covers Robert the Bruce with his own body, Craig yells to the soldiers, “Bruce is not to be harmed, that’s the arrangement!”

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Braveheart

That’s the movie’s depiction of how William Wallace was captured by the English near Glasgow on August 5th, 1305.

And right up front, I should say that there are a lot of details about how William Wallace was captured that we just don’t know. It was 1305 after all, so we’re not going to know the amount of detail we do of more recent events.

With that said, while it is true that William Wallace was betrayed, it’s pretty safe to say what we see happening in the movie is not how it happened at all. There’s a memorial in the suburb of Glasgow called Robroyston where Wallace was captured, the plaque on it gives us some clues about just how different the real thing was:

“This memorial erected 1900 AD by public subscription is to mark the site of the house in which the hero of Scotland was basely betrayed and captured about midnight on 5th August 1305 when alone with his faithful friend and co-patriot Kerlie who was slain.

Wallace’s heroic patriotism as conspicuous in his death as in his life within nine years of his betrayal the work of his life was crowned with victory and Scotland’s independence regained on the field of Bannockburn.”

So, it happened about midnight. Not daytime like in the movie. It says he was with his faithful friend who was killed. Not alone, like we see in the movie. Other sources suggest he was sleeping in a cottage when they captured him, not walking to meet with Robert the Bruce.

But, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a castle involved.

As the story goes, a Scottish nobleman by the name of Sir John Menteith conspired to capture William Wallace in exchange for land and titles. After William Wallace was captured in the cottage, he was taken to Menteith’s Dumbarton Castle.

Actually, come to think of it, the real castle looks more like what you’d think of as a castle than the one in the movie does, haha! I’ll include a photo of that in the Discord community so you can see for yourself what Dumbarton Castle looks like.

But if you want to watch the event as it was shown in the movie Braveheart you’ll find the sequence starting at about two hours, 27 minutes, and 21 seconds into the movie. We covered that movie many years ago on the podcast, so you can find our Braveheart episode at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/45

August 7th, 1882. Blackberry Creek, Kentucky.

For our next event this week, we’ll switch to the small screen and head a few minutes into the second episode or History Channel’s TV series called Hatfield & McCoys.

We’re outside. A few patches of green grass can be seen on the ground, but mostly there are brown leaves covering the ground and a few trees that look like they’ve already dropped their leaves for the season.

There are a number of different booths, tables, and wagons all set up to make a sort of crude circle. Modest decorations of red, white, and blue are strung between the circle, and if you look closely as the camera moves between the people milling about the event, there are signs hung up on some of the posts.

Does that one say “Thacker?” It’s hard to read as the camera is focusing mostly on the people dancing behind the pole the sign is hanging on. The next one is a lot easier to see. It reads:

District 2 Justice of the Peace
Vote Shadrick Osborn

That explains the red, white, and blue. This is an election.

It also seems to be a shooting contest, as some of the guys are taking aim at targets nearby.

Oh, and it’s a drinking party, too. Lots of the guys are carrying glasses filled with beer, or whiskey—we can’t tell what it is, but it’s clearly some sort of alcohol. Probably not a good thing to mix with shooting.

As time passes, the shooting continues to heat up between the competitors.

Then, we can see Kevin Costner’s version of Anse Hatfield walking arm-in-arm with his wife, Sarah Parish’s version of Levicy Hatfield. They walk one way while walking the other direction is Bill Paxton’s version of Randall McCoy walks arm-in-arm with his wife, Mare Winningham’s version of Sally McCoy. They pass by each other without saying anything or looking at each other.

From each side of the clearing surrounding by the circle of booths, the people start heckling the other side. One side seems to be the Hatfields, making fun of Randall McCoy. The other side seems to be the McCoys, making fun of Anse Hatfield.

The words start to escalate into name-calling. One of the McCoys warns one of the Hatfields about what he’s said, and taking off his coat he charges to the center of the circle. Others throw down their liquor and before long there’s a confrontation in the middle of the circle.

One of the men, Damien O’Hare’s version of Ellison Hatfield, tries to diffuse the situation and get the men to break up. It seems to work, and the Hatfields start walking back…then one of the McCoys marches up and punches someone in the back of the head. He falls to the ground. When he gets up, there are more words. More punches. Ellison tries to break it up again. Before long, it seems to be Ellison punching off the drunken McCoys as they keep coming at him.

Other Hatfields are just sitting back, drinking, and watching the fight as if it’s some sort of entertainment. And for a while, Ellison seems to be doing a good job of holding them off. In the fight, he seems to break one of the McCoys’ arms.

It looks like that’s Michael Jibson’s version of Phamer McCoy.

While on the ground, Phamer pulls out a knife with his good arm. He jumps on Ellison, stabbing him. It happens so fast, the other Hatfields watching and drinking don’t seem to realize the fight has escalated into something deadly. Ellison manages to get the man off him.

Then, Phamer pulls out a pistol. He turns, points it at Ellison, and pulls the trigger.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Hatfields & McCoys

Now it’s time for my favorite part: The fact-checking segment for when one of the most infamous family feuds in American history escalated into bloodshed.

Now, this is one of those events in history where we simply do not know the entirety of the true story. What we do know has to come from those who were there and, as you can probably guess, not everyone who was there had the same story to tell.

For one, witness testimony is never to be relied upon. Plus, this was in the 1800s in rural Kentucky, so it’s not like everything was documented.

On top of all of that, it was a feud. So, of course, those on the Hatfields side would recount the things that happened to favor their side while those on the McCoys side would favor their own side of the story.

With that historical caveat out of the way, for the most part, the History Channel’s series does a decent job of showing how it might’ve happened.

The name we see on the poster that I mentioned earlier, Shadrick Osborn, really was a real person. But, he’s not really involved in the true story we’re talking about today at all.

August 7^th, 1882 was an election day for the area in Kentucky, and there was plenty of alcohol that factored into the escalation of a pre-existing disdain between the families. We don’t really know what the spark was that caused the violence to start. Some sources say it was because of how the Hatfields treated Roseanna McCoy—the sister of the McCoy brothers that started the violence in the series. So, it might’ve been similar to what we see in the series.

Regardless of how it started, though, we do know that the violence escalated when Ellison Hatfield was stabbed multiple times. Some sources say it might’ve been as many as 24 stab wounds.

We also see Ellison getting shot in the series, and while people there did say that happened, it probably didn’t happen while he was still standing up like we see in the series. After being stabbed, it’s more likely Ellison was on the ground when he was shot. He didn’t die right away, but there also wasn’t anything that could be done.

And as you can probably guess, there was retaliation from the Hatfields. It was led by Ellison’s brother, Anse—he’s played by Kevin Costner in the series. After local law enforcement was called, the McCoy brothers were arrested.

Conveniently enough, some of those law enforcement officers just happened to be Hatfields. So, it’s probably not too much of a surprise that Anse and some of his other family and friends were able to get the McCoy brothers out of the law’s custody before they made it to the closest jail.

After Ellison Hatfield succumbed to his wounds, Anse and his posse of vigilantes killed the McCoy brothers. Some sources say they fired over 50 bullets into the three McCoys.

And as you can probably guess, there was retaliation from the McCoys. And so, the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys turned into an especially bloody one this week in history.

If you want to watch this as it happened in the History Channel series, the segment we started today with is about five minutes into the second episode of 2012’s Hatfields & McCoys miniseries.

August 7th, 1974. New York City, New York.

I think I forgot to mention in the last segment that anniversary is on Wednesday this week. Well, that’s the same for our next event. In fact, Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of an event that was the subject of the Robert Zemeckis movie called The Walk.

We’ll start about an hour and a half into the movie, as the camera is overlooking the city, giving us a beautiful view of the buildings below. The sun is just starting to rise in the distance. In the foreground, stretching from left to right across the frame is a wire of some sort. We can’t see what’s on either end, but the wire is in focus leaving the cityscape below to be slightly blurry.

Slowly, the camera pans to the right. As it does, we can see what the wire is connected to as a massive metal structure starts to fill up the frame. The camera stops as a foot enters the top of the frame. Wearing what looks like a black slip-on shoe of some sort, the foot reaches down until it steps onto the wire. We can also see at least one leg of what we can assume are black pants.

Then, the camera pans up the leg and back slightly.

Now we can see who the foot and leg belong to: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s version of Philippe Petit.

Behind him, the structure we saw a moment ago is also easier to see. It’s the rooftop of a big building. At least it looks big, part of it seems to be obscured by the morning fog. Another man is standing up there with him. He’s handing Philippe what looks like a long, metal rod.

The camera cuts back to looking at his feet now. Except instead of looking at the structure where he’s at, the shot is looking from behind his feet, across the wire, to the other side.

So, now we can see on the right side of the frame is the structure that dialogue in the movie confirms is a building. One of Philippe’s feet is on the building. The other one is a step down, carefully placed on the wire. That wire stretches from the building Philippe is partially on, across a gap covered in fog and to a building on the other side of the frame—that building is also partially covered by the fog.

A few seconds pass, and the fog rolls by a little bit more, covering up whatever we could see on the other side. Now the wire just looks like it’s going into nothingness. The fog continues to grow, as Philippe’s inner monologue explains that the sounds of New York faded below him: All I could see was the wire.

A moment passes as Philippe surveys the scene in front of him.

And then, carefully, Phillipe takes his foot off the building and places it on the wire.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Walk

That depiction of Phillipe Petit walking the high wire stretched between the two World Trade Center buildings in New York City really did happen on August 7^th, 1974.

And not to spoil the ending of the movie, but he did make it across. I’m guessing you already knew that part of it is true, too, since they probably wouldn’t have made a movie about it if he hadn’t been successful.

To quote from Sony Pictures’ official summary posted over on IMDb, “Twelve people have walked on the moon, but only one man – Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – has ever, or will ever, walk in the immense void between the World Trade Center towers.”

The walk between the towers wasn’t some random event.

Walking between the towers was something Phillipe Petit wanted to do ever since he found out they were being built in 1968—well, technically, the construction for the towers began in 1967, but Petit found out about them in 1968.

In 1971, he walked between the two towers of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. He got arrested for that since it’s illegal to do that. But, he got free and in 1973, he walked between pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. Back in New York City, the two towers of the World Trade Center had their ribbon-cutting ceremony in April of 1973.

Then, in early 1974, Petit visited New York City. He also knew he’d have to compensate for both the wind as well as the towers moving, too. Standing 1,360 feet tall, the towers were designed to sway in the wind. So, he had a lot of preparation to do.

He took reconnaissance photos. He practiced on similar distances.

But, the walk itself was just part of it. They had to get the line secured. And they had to do it in a way that no one would know they’re doing it. After all, what he did was technically illegal.

In fact, many people have called his feat the ‘artistic crime of the century.’

The night before, on August 6^th, Petit and a few people helping him, snuck up to the south tower. Well, most of them.

A couple of the guys helping him went to the north tower. From there, they used a bow and arrow to shoot fishing line between the towers. Since it was dark and fishing line isn’t very easy to see to begin with, it took a while for Petit to find on the other side.

He even had to take off his clothes to feel around with more of his skin to find the line. Once they did, the steel wire was pulled between the towers and after much effort, finally secured.

The walk itself took place at about 7:15 AM local time on August 7^th, 1974.

It took about 45 minutes for Petit to span the distance between the towers. But, then again, he didn’t do it just once. All that work wasn’t for a single trip. He went back and forth eight times.

Oh, and to do some conversions, the towers are 1,360 feet tall so about 414 meters with a distance between them of 200 feet, so about 61 meters. Although I also found some sources saying Petit’s cable was 131 feet long, so about 40 meters, which could make sense that whoever measures the distance between the towers aren’t measuring for a cable connecting them, haha!

Just like we see in the movie, a crowd below gathered to see it happen. And as you can probably guess, police showed up on the other side to arrest Petit as soon as he stepped off the wire. He was released that afternoon—after a psych eval to make sure he was okay, of course. The only condition of his release was that he do a free performance in Central Park.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, check out the 2015 movie called The Walk. The sequence we started our segment with today starts at about an hour, 28 minutes and 11 seconds into the movie.

August 8th, 1974. Washington DC.

I’ve got a quick fourth bonus event for you this week, and it comes about four minutes into the 2008 movie Frost/Nixon.

We’re looking over the shoulder of a man as he’s reviewing the papers on the desk in front of him. From somewhere off-screen, we can hear a man saying, “15 seconds, Mr. President.”

The camera cuts to…well, another camera. There are two red lights above the camera as the countdown continues.

“Five, four…”

We can see the President’s cufflinks in a closeup shot as he straightens the papers. They’re in his hands, now.

Then, he begins the speech.

“Good evening, this is the 37^th time I have addressed you from the office,” he says into the camera on the other side of the desk.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Frost/Nixon

As I said, it’s a quick scene in the movie, but that’s how the 2008 movie called Frost/Nixon depicts an event that happened this week in history when, on August 8^th, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced to a live television audience that he would resign the Presidency effective the following day, making him the first president in the history of the United States to resign.

And that really is how Nixon started his speech that day, but in the movie we don’t see much of the speech before it cuts away. And I can understand why they decided to do that in the film—if for no other reason than the speech was about 15 minutes long.

That’s a lot to include in the movie, especially since the point of the movie is what happened after the speech and not the speech itself. But since they show how the speech began in the movie, let’s hear the first few minutes of the real speech…and then if you want to see the original television broadcast, I’ll include that over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/338

Good evening.

This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this Nation. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the national interest.

In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future.

But with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged.

I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations.

From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.

To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.

Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

And then Nixon continued the rest of the speech for a few more minutes. If you want to see the full speech, you can watch a clip of the original broadcast over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/338

But that’s not the only thing from this week in history relevant to the true story.

The next day, at about noon on August 9^th, 1974, President Nixon officially stepped down and the office of the President was transferred to Vice President Gerald Ford who, then, became the 38^th President of the United States.

And then almost exactly a year later, on August 10^th, 1975—so also this week in history—David Frost bought the rights to an exclusive interview with former President Nixon. That’s the story told in the 2008 movie Frost/Nixon, so if you want to see the event that happened this week in history, the text on the screen saying it’s August 8^th, 1974, is at about four minutes and two seconds into the movie. And then the rest of the movie is about David Frost’s interview with Nixon.

And we covered that movie way back in the single digits—episode number four of Based on a True Story.

Historical birthdays from the movies

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On August 5^th, 1930, Neil Alden Armstrong was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio. And I probably butchered that pronunciation, so if you’re from Wapakoneta, or however you pronounce it, and you want to let us know, join the Based on a True Story Discord to share the correct pronunciation. But, Neil Armstrong was an astronaut best known as the first person to walk on the Moon. We learned all about that just last month during the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission where we relied heavily on the way history was depicted in the 2018 biopic about his life called First Man. You can learn more about the historical accuracy of that movie over at http://basedonatruestorypodcast.com/144

On August 7^th, 1876, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. She was better known as Mata Hari, which was her stage name as an exotic dancer and courtesan. Although, history perhaps best remembers her as a woman who was executed by a French firing squad after being convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I. We dug into her story based on the movie about her life, which you can listen to at http://basedonatruestorypodcast.com/74

On August 10^th, 1874, Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa. He was the 31^st President of the United States so it’s probably not too surprising that he’s been portrayed in a few different movies—if you’re looking for one to watch, I’d recommend The Day the Bubble Burst. Fair warning, it’s a highly fictional account about the stock market crash in 1929, but Hoover was played by actor Franklin Cover in the movie.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

Time now for our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies released this week in history.

We’re going back to the late 2000s for this one, for the comedy-drama film called Julie & Julia, which released 15 years ago, on August 7^th, 2009.

Directed by Nora Ephron, Julie & Julia intertwines the lives of two women who share a passion for cooking. It covers Julia Child’s early years in the culinary world and Julie Powell’s year-long blogging project.

The story begins with Julia Child (Meryl Streep) in the 1950s as she and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) move to Paris. Eager to find a purpose, Julia enrolls at Le Cordon Bleu, a prestigious culinary school. Despite facing skepticism and gender bias, she becomes determined to master French cooking. With her friends Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Julia embarks on writing a French cookbook for American housewives. The process is long and challenging, but Julia’s perseverance pays off when the book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” is finally published, revolutionizing American cuisine.

Parallel to Julia’s story is Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a government employee in New York City in 2002. Feeling unfulfilled in her job, Julie decides to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook within a year and blogs about her experience. The blog quickly gains popularity, and Julie finds herself dealing with the pressures of her ambitious project while balancing her personal life with her supportive but sometimes frustrated husband, Eric (Chris Messina).

Throughout the film, the stories of Julia and Julie run in tandem, highlighting their respective challenges and triumphs. Julia’s journey shows her transformation into a culinary icon, while Julie’s journey depicts her struggle for self-fulfillment and recognition. The film culminates with Julie visiting a reconstruction of Julia’s kitchen at the Smithsonian Institution, paying homage to the woman who inspired her.

The movie ends on a poignant note, showing the impact both women had on each other’s lives, even though they never met.

And the movie is correct to show Julia Child’s reaction to Julie Powell’s blog. In the true story, Julia Child considered Powell’s blog more of a publicity stunt than a serious culinary endeavor. According to an article on The Cinemaholic, Julia Child’s exact words about Julie Powell was, “I don’t think she’s a serious cook.”

As you can probably imagine, when Julie Powell found out about this, she was crushed upon hearing her culinary idol’s disapproval.

The portrayal of Julia Child’s time at Le Cordon Bleu is also historically accurate. Julia Child was one of the few women studying at the prestigious culinary school in the 1950s. She faced significant challenges and skepticism from her male counterparts and some instructors, who doubted her capabilities. However, Child’s determination and passion for cooking shone through, and she excelled in her training, eventually co-authoring “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

Switching to how the movie shows Julie Powell’s blog project, it is true that her blog project was to cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cookbook in one year. Powell started her blog in 2002, documenting her daily experiences and challenges of cooking in her tiny New York apartment kitchen. The blog quickly gained a large following, leading to a book deal and transforming Powell’s life. Her memoir called Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen became a bestseller and was used as a basis for the filmmakers.

But that doesn’t mean getting published was easy for Julie or Julia.

The film accurately portrays the long and arduous process Julia Child faced in getting her cookbook published. Julia and her co-authors spent several years perfecting the recipes and manuscript, and were rejected by publishers time and time again finally securing a deal with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

Julia’s book called Mastering the Art of French Cooking which published in 1961 was a significant milestone, marking the beginning of Julia’s impact on American culinary culture.

The depiction of Julie Powell’s life in New York City, including her job and her strained relationship with her husband, Eric, is accurate enough to get the gist across. It’s always a good idea to remember that dialogue in movies is often one of the most made-up things, so the general plot points around a strained relationship can be accurate even if the specific conversations that strain the relationship are made up for the movie, if that makes sense.

Although, it’s also a good idea to remember that this movie was based on Julie Powell’s memoir, so maybe some of those conversations were real, but there’s no way that I, the filmmakers, or anyone else who wasn’t there would be able to prove that. At least, for the parts about Julie. The filmmakers also the book that Julia Child co-wrote with her great nephew Alex Prud’homme called My Life in France. I’ll add links to both of those in the show notes, of course.

But, it is true that the real Julie Powell worked at the LMDC handling calls related to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. For a bit of context, the LMDC, or Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, was formed in November of 2001 with the purpose of reconstructing lower Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

She wasn’t happy at her job, so that’s a big reason why she threw herself into the blogging project as a creative escape.

If you want to watch how the movie portrays the relationship between Julie and Julia, hop into the show notes to find where you can watch it right now.